I spent the 1990-91 academic year studying logic and metaphysics at the university of Saint Andrews in Scotland. While there, I started taking "scenic" photographs for the first time, using a used fixed lens Nikon point'n'shoot. Since I didn't know much about photography, I used the shotgun approach: Take tons of pictures and throw most of them out. Thus while I shot lots of film, I only have a few decent photographs from my time in Scotland . The Scottish landscape is incredibly beautiful, and I hope to some day return with better equipment and better photographic skills.
I spent the next year living in Hamburg, Germany. This time I took my father's Zeiss Contaflex I, a decent quality manual camera. Since I had read that serious photographers shot slides, that's what I did. Unfortunately, I didn't have the camera's instruction manual, and so I didn't realize that the aperture needed to be changed when the auxiliary telephoto attachment was added. That, together with a fairly soft lens, lead to so-so pictures. While the results didn't generally please me, I enjoyed taking the pictures very much. While visiting places is lots of fun, the interactive nature of photographing appeals to me. While in Germany, we were lucky enough to travel fairly extensively.
The following summer I was the staff photographer for the National High School Institute at Northwestern University. NHSI runs summer programs for high school juniors. My job was to take photographs of the students for use in brochures. To better accomplish this, I bought a used Nikon FM camera, and a couple of fixed focal length lenses, and a Vivitar 285 flash. Since I had to do a fair amount of theater photography, I needed fast film, and so I used T-max 3200 BW film, the fastest that I could find. This use sparked my interested in black and white photography.
After Northwestern, I moved on to graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin. While there, I worked part-time for Star Photo, a small camera retailer. At this time, I noticed Zone VI's advertisements, and I ordered one of their catalogues. Zone VI was a small company founded and run by Fred Picker. They put out a very informative catalogue of various items, including their view cameras, tripods, and Fred's newsletters. Fred passionately advocated large format photography and darkroom work, and his writings motivated me to find out more. One day a customer mentioned that he had a large format camera that he wanted to sell, and soon I became the proud owner of a Sinar P Expert set.
Shortly thereafter, I bought a Nikor 6x7 enlarger, as I couldn't afford a 4x5 enlarger. I developed film and printed in the bathroom of our apartment, and I've been photographing and printing ever since, mainly black and white, although once a year I do color printing.
Currently, I have a dedicated darkroom in our basement. I take pictures mainly with my father's Rolleiflex Automat TLR, two medium format Fuji rangefinders, 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras, a small digital point'n'shoot, and a Nikon d200.
My photographic goals are to have fun and to make photographs that interest me visually. Everything else--such as whether they are "art", digital or traditional prints, or good representations--doesn't matter to me.
All content © 1990-2007 Peter De Smidt