My photographs in 1978 and 2022

In 1978, I was in the fifth year of the six-year Medical Scientist Training Program leading to MD and PhD degrees at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. It was a rigorous program, but I found time to also pursue my favorite hobby since childhood, photography.  I took a series of advanced photography classes at the Callanwolde Community Arts Center culminating in a course on the zone system. The zone system was developed by photographers Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1939-40 as a way to pay attention to the shades of gray in a black and white photo through careful use of a spot light meter, a good eye for natural light, and sometimes careful dodging and burning during exposure of the final print in the darkroom to lighten or darken areas of the image that might need tonal adjustment.  Every print created with the zone system is unique.

In 1978, my wife Lois and I discovered that flying to London for Christmas would be no more expensive than flying home to California to see our families as we usually did. I don’t think my mother was particularly pleased with our decision, but we had a wonderful, Dickensonian week in London complete with a blizzard on our final day. On Christmas morning we walked across the street from our genteel-shabby hotel on Bayswater Road into Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. The sun was just coming up and it was near freezing. Nobody else seemed to be up and about yet. As we came to the Serpentine Bridge, I was struck by the early morning light illuminating the underside of the bridge. As I got ready to take the shot, I saw the geese approaching from the left, so I waited until they were silhouetted by the reflected sky before pressing the shutter release. It was just one shot on black and white film. When I returned to my darkroom in Atlanta, I darkened the tree branches in the left upper corner by selectively overexposing that portion of the print. This is one of my very favorite photographs. In fact, it won a prize in a photography contest in Atlanta in 1979, and the original silver print still hangs in our house.

Life got even busier in the 1980s with more clinical training, a research fellowship, a faculty appointment, more neurology training, and the birth of our three children. I didn’t have time for working in the darkroom or taking long walks to find interesting things to photograph.  Photography switched to a way of documenting our lives. I was unapologetically taking snapshots. In 2004 I made the switch to digital photography. I soon realized that I was no longer limited to a single or even a few attempts to get a good image. I could take as many as I wanted. It may have been sloppy, but it worked. After I retired in 2013, I once again had time to take photographs for the sake of creating a pleasing image, not just a documentation of life, although there is a lot of that too with five grandchildren keeping us wonderfully busy. I love to photograph birds and other wildlife, and the digital camera is perfect for this.  I also like to photograph the moon, especially when it is at its perigee, the closest distance to earth. A few days ago (July 13), I took my camera, tripod, and telephoto lens down to an open lot several blocks away that afforded a beautiful view of downtown Portland. I watched as the moon rose seemingly right next to the second tallest building in Portland, the US Bancorp Tower. I clicked away, rapidly capturing twenty or so images. None of the photos turned out well with one exception, and that one was a mistake. I had very limited visibility in the viewfinder. Given the strong contrast between the very bright moon and the trees in front of me, I did not realize that one of these images was shot through the branches of the tree.  The automatic focus thought I was trying to photograph the trees, so these leaves are razor sharp draped across the blurred image of the more distant moon and tall building. This photo is the antithesis of my structured, rule-following photograph of the Serpentine Bridge, but I quite like this somewhat ominous image. It might be a metaphor for my Alzheimer-addled brain. Is it art? Is it any good? Does it really matter?