I received an email from Dino today. Dino is from Italy, is a professional photographer and takes pictures of everyday people. He has made it his life’s task to shine a light on people he meets by chance on the street. Last week he met me. Today he sent me the results.
It is of course a little thought-provoking that I stand out in the crowd just by being myself, but that is another story.
In the email he had attached some portraits he took of me when we met. Dino has control over his photos. He shares them on Instagram and sends digital copies to those he takes pictures of. So far over 200.000 people have viewed mine.
I also take digital photos. Pictures that will become memories. Images that can be inherited for generations. Back in the days, the film became negatives that you could make new pictures of for years. Probably for hundreds of years. The pictures were kept in an album or in a shoebox as a memento or for future generations to find.
Many of the pictures my father took when I was growing up were of people without heads. What he saw in the viewfinder was clearly not what came onto the picture. Taking good pictures in the old days was an artform.
To compose a good picture you had to have skills, knowledge, luck and time to set the different knobs in the right position. And when you were ready to shoot the object was gone.
But sometimes it went well. We have all heard about how the iconic image of Che Guevara came to be. Alberto Corda had no big plan. No planned composition. A Leica camera. A snapshot of a man on a podium. Iconic and historic. Perhaps the most famous image in modern history.
Today, everyone has a camera in their pocket. A camera with amazing features. Properties so good that the photographer hardly needs photographic knowledge to take a good or fantastic picture. But where do they all end up? All these snapshots we take every day? Do they end up in the album or as copies in a shoebox? Is there a digital shoebox the generations after us can rummage through and find the flashbacks with a little weird or even poor composition – and think; that was typically how the old man was!
I grew up with a manual camera. Grew into the digital world and loved it! But I find little evidence from all the digital pictures I have taken over the years.
Now I have purchased a manual camera with film again. As usual, I exaggerate when I take a stand. I could buy a camera from the 70s, 80s or 90s, but no. I bought a Leica from 1938! If Leica was good enough for Alberto Corda, then it’s good enough for me! Now I probably have to go to school for a year or two to learn how to compose pictures again. I have a correspondence course from the 80’s that I hope can come in handy!
I remember that there was something called the “golden ratio”. I learnt in the correspondence course that “The golden ratio” means dividing a line or a surface into two parts so that the smallest part relates to the largest like this to the whole line or surface.
Ok! That was clear as ink…
May luck, time, skills and perseverance be with me and my old Leica!
Billy Bronco is telling you 