As a medical photographer
As a medical photographer I photographed and filmed patient anomalies, surgical operations, and autopsies. I also engaged in photomicroscopy, photomacroscopy, and macrophotography of pathological specimens. As a department we provided all the public relations photography for the hospital as well as the negatives for the print shop for all the forms that the hospital needed. Eventually, we produced all of the hospital’s publications inhouse. We produced slide shows, films, and eventually videos for fundraising purposes. As a teaching hospital we were tasked with producing hundreds of thousands of lecture slides for the doctors and other medical personnel before the days of digital cameras and computer-generated graphics. I eventually supervised three medical photographers, a medical illustrator, two graphic designers, a typesetter, and freelance personnel as needed.
My Freelance Work
I also engaged in a considerable amount of freelance work: wedding photographs, portrait photographs, publicity photographs for two local theatre groups, architectural photography, and aerial photography.
During this period of my life, I was a very active cross country skier, snowshoer, ice climber, and hiker, but never went anywhere without a pair of Leica rangefinder cameras, loaded with my favorite film, Kodachrome, strapped to my chest. Although I took many black and white photographs for my job, I never had much interest in pursuing that medium for my personal work. Color photography always appealed to me much more.
Eventually, I started to realize that the Leica cameras, although very suited to scenic photography, were not very useful for the type of work that I enjoyed most: up close photography of nature, which was a natural extension of my work as a medical photographer. I also came to realize that 35mm film had its limitations in terms of enlargement. I started using medium format Hasselblad and Mamiya cameras for most of my personal work. The larger film size allowed me to make much larger prints with greater detail. At one point I owned a huge, large format 8”x10” Deardorff wooden camera with a reducing back to shoot 4”x5” film.
A Lifelong Bicycle Enthusiast
After many years at Maine Medical Center, tiring of the 60+ hour weeks that I was working, I had an opportunity to move to Boston and start a totally different career in the bicycle retail business, where I worked for 31 years as the general manager of the largest bicycle retailer in New England before retiring. I have been a lifelong bicycle enthusiast. For seven years I stopped taking serious photographs and sold all of my camera equipment. However, an opportunity to travel to Churchill, Manitoba to photograph polar bears, caribou, and other wildlife came along. I borrowed some camera equipment from my sister-in-law and thirty-six rolls of film later I was hooked on photography again.
I subsequently purchased some medium format equipment and used it for ten years before deciding that the advantages of large format cameras were more suitable to the photography that I was pursuing. Large format cameras have camera movements at the lens plane and the film plane that allow for image correction to rectify (or enhance) distortion and to increase (or decrease) depth of focus. I bought and sold several view cameras until I discovered that I needed the portability of a foldable field camera, much like the Deardorff camera I once owned, and I did not need the more extensive camera movements of the view camera for my work. I decided to buy a Linhof Technika 4”x5” camera, which was the camera that one of my photographic heroes, Eliot Porter, used. After a few years I decided to buy a larger and much heavier Linhof Technika 5”x7” camera because it had a much longer bellows, which allowed me to use longer focal length lenses and move further away from my subject matter when shooting my up close images. I use a 4”x5” reducing back on that camera and shoot 4”x5” color transparency film. I also make 6x12cm (2-1/4”x5”) images on 120 format color transparency roll film for my “panoramic” scenic and up close photography.
My Camera Equipment
Photographing with my twelve pound camera on an eleven pound wooden tripod is not a simple matter of walking up to a scene and pressing the shutter. Unpacking the camera from my thirty pound backpack and setting it up on the tripod is a ten minute operation. Composing an image almost always involves moving the heavy camera and tripod back and forth or left and right many times to capture just the right field. This is especially true when photographing up close. I often spend another ten to fifteen minutes composing up close images before clicking the shutter.
There are no zoom lenses available for large format camera. I primarily use four apochromatically corrected lenses, each of a fixed focal length. These apochromatic lenses focus all three wavelengths of light at the same point, which I consider critical for color photography. Each lens is in its own shutter, which must be manually opened for focusing, then manually closed before being manually cocked and triggered with a cable release for exposure.
- Linhof 5”x7” Technika field camera with 4”x5” reducing back
- Linhof reflex viewfinder
- Linhof bellows lens shade
- Linhof 18” cable release
- Fujinon A 180mm f/9 lens
- Fujinon C 300mm f/8.5 lens
- Fujinon C 450mm f/12.5 lens
- Fujinon C 600mm f/11.5 lens
- Schneider-Kreuznach 120mm f/6.8 lens
- 5-Linhof 4”x5” sheet film holders (double sided)
- Horseman 6x12cm roll film holder
- Minolta Spotmeter F
- Various filters
- Lowe Expedition backpack
- Renaissance Camera Tech padded compartment cases
- Beretta shooting vest
- Ries wooden tripod with Manfrotto ballhead
Total weight: 55lb
Nothing is Automatic
There are no motor drives for making multiple images in succession. Focusing is done manually on a ground glass screen on the back of the camera. Automatic exposures simply do not exist. Exposure determination is accomplished with a separate handheld light meter, which is then manually transferred to the aperture ring and the shutter speed ring on the lens. I must decide what aperture and shutter speed is appropriate for the scene being photographed.
After focusing, metering, setting the aperture and shutter speed, closing and cocking the shutter a film holder is inserted in the camera back, a dark slide is removed, the shutter triggered by the cable release exposing the film, the dark slide re-inserted, the film holder removed, and then the camera is then ready for composing another photograph. For my 6x12cm panoramic photographs I actually must remove the focusing screen and attached the roll film back in addition to the above steps.
On top of all the steps that I have mentioned above, I am also faced with another problem that the photographer with smaller format cameras does not need to consider. I use long focus lenses for my photography. I actually never use wide angle lenses on my large format camera. I do not like the distortion. These lenses would be considered telephoto lenses with smaller format cameras. Telephoto lenses have very shallow depth of focus. When one focuses on a subject the foreground and background is out of focus with normal shooting apertures. I need to “stop down” my lenses to very small apertures in order to achieve my goal of having everything in focus, especially in my up close photographs. These small apertures require very long exposure times. Fortunately, the ability to adjust the lens plane on my camera helps me to control the depth of focus without needing to use even longer exposures. Even still I often need to wait for the wind to stop blowing my subject matter. Many times I have actually had to scrap a photograph because there is too much movement in the up close scenes that I am photographing.
QUALITY
I take the time
You might ask why I bother with all this time-consuming procedure when I could simply point a digital camera at my subjects and snap a photograph without even using a tripod. There is a one word answer: QUALITY. These days I actually often use a digital camera when scouting photographic opportunities. Sometimes the images of my high quality digital cameras result in a ones that I feel are worth enlarging and selling. This is especially true of the scenic photographs. You will also see several photographs that I have taken with my medium format cameras on this website. However, I have never been able to achieve the same results with digital, small, or medium format cameras in my up close photography as I can with my large format camera. I have spent many hours wandering in the outdoors with my equipment looking for a piece of nature that captures my attention and shouts at me to make a photograph. While I am often thwarted in my attempts to find the right subject matter, I am rarely disappointed with the results when I take the time to reproduce the scene in my own methodical way.
What draws me to photography, or, more to the point, why do I take photographs? I try to put on film the environment around me from my unique perspective. I look for a special quality of light, which for me is early and late in the day for my scenic photography, and cloudy or even rainy days for my up close photography. Much of my scenic photography depicts the subtle colors of nature. I rarely photograph brightly sunlit scenes. Most of my up close photography is a search for intensity of color and contrast in color between the objects in my subject matter. Above all else, I try to depict nature in all its chaotic beauty in the most accurate and appealing manner possible in my photographs.