From my earliest days I’ve thought of myself as an artist. Before I entered school I drew pictures of ornate robots on airless moons, comets with sweeping tails, ray-gunning spaceships, and Saturn-like ringed planets. In kindergarten I patiently waited my turn at the painting easel eager to show off my abilities, but was astonished when I discovered the paint brush was an entirely different tool from a pencil and my picture dribbled into a sopping mess. In my elementary years I drew dragons, pilgrim ships at sea, and superheroes. Although school didn’t seem hard I don’t know how I learned anything. I rushed through my boring assignments to take pleasure in drawing. Each year my teachers’ report card comments always said the same thing: they never had a student with greater imagination. Hyperbole maybe, but those words became an important part of my personal identity.

As a kid I received a camera as a Christmas gift, but there was never any way that photography could become something I might get involved in because with my meager allowance I couldn’t pay for film, flashbulbs, and developing. Besides, to my mind, photography was the way people who couldn’t draw made pictures. If you could draw why do photography?

In college I really learned how to draw. And paint, too, although that took some time. I learned, for example, how to make scenes lie down flat through overlapping, geometrical and atmospheric perspective, through subtle changes in color, through contrast and diminishing detail. I learned about composition. By then I could afford film and developing costs, but a camera was just a novelty to me. The few photos I’d taken over the years were disappointing. Not really reflective of what I saw with my eye. I could fathom no reason to lock my images to the low fidelity keyhole of a camera. Besides I created most of my pictures from my imagination, which cameras had no access to.

Much later when I became a teacher, I was immersed in computers, which naturally led (once I got a color computer) to computer graphics. I used Eric Wenger’s KPT Bryce to create otherworldly landscapes. I pushed the software’s geometric primitive shapes to their limit and made pictures of alien creatures, robots, and space ships not so much different from my early drawings. The trouble with the software was that some areas didn’t render as well as others. I used Corel Painter to retouch those areas using the skills I learned as a college Art student. Painter was full of bugs, which only compounded with each new version. Finally I switched to Photoshop Elements and grew comfortable with that interface; eventually I upgraded to the full version of Photoshop.

Point and shoot digital cameras were inexpensive and I used one to take photos of students at the elementary school where I taught for an in-house yearbook. With digital cameras I didn’t have to buy film or pay for developing. I could shoot as many photos as I liked and it wouldn’t cost me a penny more. What a great thing that was!

My point and shoot camera gave way to a cropped sensor DSLR, which later gave way to a full-frame sensor DSLR, which eventually gave way to a couple of mirrorless cameras and an embarrassingly large assortment of lenses. I typically took 400 to 600 photos during a camera outing, sometimes more if I was an event photographer. My photo storage needs expanded and expanded again and again because more is better.

Not long ago out of curiosity I started watching film photography videos on YouTube. Landscape photographers lugged backpacks brimming with heavy equipment to return with only a handful of photos and were usually happy with at least some of them. Not only that, but (my God!) they were slow. They moved slowly, they spoke slowly. They set up their tripods slowly. They framed their shots slowly. Moving on to their next shot was like the union army breaking camp. And when they returned home most of them developed their own negatives! And in all this slowness I found something that appealed. A stillness. Something that took me back to my process and pacing as an artist. Painting a picture on a blank canvas takes time. These film photographers took their time when they (not their cameras any more than a brush paints a picture) made their images. Their craftsmanship, their skill, their eye and hand, their expertise (and far less the equipment) was evident at each stage of realization of their pictures.

I took a deep breath and decided to give film a try. My father-in-law owned a film camera, a TOPCON Besler Super D, 35mm, which was given to me when he passed away. I took a roll of B&W with it, but the film broke inside the camera. The next roll I loaded was also B&W. I had trouble rewinding it in the camera and then the roll got lost when the camera shop sent it to be developed. It took only a short time for me to realize that the Super D was not for me. It took only slightly longer to realize that 35mm was not my film medium of choice either. Scale is so important in making pictures and 35mm is too damn small.

I bought a Yashica A, which I got comfortable with. It used 120 film. First I figured out a way to scan my negatives with my mirrorless camera. Eventually I decided to dive in and learn to develop my own negatives, which was a whole lot easier than I feared it would be. It was, in fact, fun!

Somewhere in the transition from digital to film (or film/digital hybrid) I became enthralled with pinhole photography. Pinhole photos remind me of charcoal drawings. I started out with a ZeroImage Zero 618B Infinite Multi-Format Pinhole Camera, but the camera had odd light leaks. Any pinhole camera with an image ratio of 6 x 18 will feature a heavy vignette and distortion at the edges. This is a result of the film plane nearest the pinhole getting the most light. Areas of the film farther away from the pinhole get less light and as the angle of the light increases so does distortion. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I discovered that many pinhole camera makers have solved this problem by wrapping the film around a curved plane. This design makes it so all areas of the film are more or less equally distant from the pinhole therefore equally lit and with little distortion. My wife bought a Vermeer 6×17 Panoramic Curved Plane Pinhole Camera for me for Fathers Day, and it has since become my main camera. It’s a beauty.

Because of my art background, my skill at drawing, I’ve approached photography differently, I think, from many other photographers. I never trust the camera to give me the best possible version of my photos. I always do at least some post-processing. If you’re shooting raw the manufacturer’s assumption is that you (or someone) will at minimum adjust the contrast, saturation, color balance and sharpness. I’m horrified to think that anyone would trust jpeg compression to handle those functions, but I guess some people do. All those drawing and painting skills learned in college I use when I post-process my photos. Why would I not? I’ve listened to many photographers describe dream cameras which made perfect photos and they would never have to post-process another photo again! Can you imagine a cook who found the greatest pleasure in shopping for ingredients, but loathed baking and cooking?

A camera lens doesn’t know the difference between a man’s ribs and a cloud. It has no understanding to work from. A painter interprets. A painter enhances and edits according to knowledge and understanding of a scene. A lens can only capture the light falling into it. It takes the artist to breath life into a painting or a photo. That’s what post-processing is all about. It allows the photographer to interpret, edit and enhance according to knowledge, understanding and experience.

One final point. There is an important difference between photography and painting aside from the mechanics of how the images are made. A painter can shift his head with its stereoptic eyes around to gather the data needed to create a painting. A camera lens on the other hand is for most purposes necessarily fixed. I remember my painting teacher during class one day asking me what was going on with the model’s right ear because my drawing was unconvincing on that area. I said, I didn’t know; I couldn’t see it. She told me to get up and go over to take a look. That lesson stuck with me. A painter’s image is a composite of many slightly different points of view jumbled together to trick the viewer (to a greater or less degree depending on the skill of the painter) into experiencing the illusion of three-dimensional space. A camera lens, however wide or narrow angled it might be, is a fixed keyhole.

As a photographer with a painting background the lens-locked aspect of photography bothered me. I discovered a way around this by making photographic panoramas. Patching together an image out of photos taken from slightly different points creates an image that breathes, that has openness. A panorama film camera with a curved film plane also seems to recreate a feeling of openness. The pinhole doesn’t change position, but the film plane itself by curving creates a photo that feels closer to the experience of a pair of shifting human eyes.

Every artist has a unique approach to image making whether they are painters or photographers. Those approaches may shift over time and merge into fresh new ways of expressing the pictures that sit before their eyes or bubble out of their imaginations.

You can see Glen’s Vermeer pinhole photos at https://tinyurl.com/23uwp6p8