Join us for a presentation by ACC club member Bob Webber on 28 April 2021 for a presentation titled “Hidden Colors.” According to Bob…
My first imaging contraption was a cardboard box with a lens from my grandmother’s opera glasses at one end and a piece of photo sensitive paper, partly exposed and brought home by my mother from her office at the other. The image of our garden in Ghana didn’t last as parents weren’t too keen on their 10 year old messing around with chemistry. My curiosity into understanding anything mechanical had already proved very destructive, particularly to clocks.
First serious camera was a hand me down from my mother, something like a Eastman Kodak Duaflex Twin Lens Reflex that took 620 film, circa 1950s. That was followed by a Kodak Instamatic 126 for my 14th birthday. I started to take Photography seriously in 1971 when I got my first SLR, a Pratika and came to Wisconsin to visit my American Aunts and Cousins. At Oxford the college had a fully equipped darkroom which was hardly ever used. This was an ideal opportunity to learn the whole black and white process from start to finish. This time, having left home, I had access to all the necessary chemistry. From the mid 70s to mid 80s I would shoot slides and even developed color prints from these slides with the Cibachrome process which produces lovely 8×10 prints. Over the years I traded up SLRs, added more lenses and features such as a light meter in the camera, then auto exposure, switched to Cannon in 1981, Added digital in 2004 and continued to add more lenses from wide to long and macro, extension tubes and bellows. On joining ACC in 2014, I realized that most of my early work was really journal photography, i.e. recording life and travel, though there has always been an interest in macro and flowers with and without bugs. These days my interest is in set pieces and art Photography that I have learned is a branch of still life.