Tag

film

How I got into photography

By | Blog, Photography | No Comments

A friend asked me the other day how and when I got into photography… which got me thinking. I don’t remember why I started taking photos (although Mom & Dad always had a camera so I was likely modeling after them). I do remember being fascinated by the old film cameras that my parents had stored in the hallway closet—one of them was an old Konica of some kind and I think it had a really cool expanding flash surround with small blue flash bulbs.

In any case, I remember having access to a small film camera pretty early on. At first, I was mostly interested in taking pictures of my pets and my toys. I think I was around nine years old then. Around age 13 or so, I took a 4-H photography course, and learned to do photo stories. In high school I was mostly into candid shots of my friends or family (especially my little nephews and nieces), plus some photos for art class, and I remember filling albums and albums of photos. In third year college, I had the chance to learn black & white photography, including developing my own prints in the darkroom. I borrowed my parents Canon AE-1 for those, and learned to shoot manually. That’s when I finally started to learn technique and to think about composition and concept.
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Bill Cunningham New York

By | Blog, Culture, Photography | No Comments

Last night at the advice of a friend I went to see a movie called Bill Cunningham New York which is a film by Richard Press. It is playing at the Cinamatheque in Winnipeg until September 15, 2011. I loved this movie… Bill just seems to glow with happiness and passion for his work and he has a beautiful, simple approach to life. I would highly recommend it.

“The “Bill” in question is 80+ New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends and high society charity soirées for the Times Style section in his columns “On the Street” and “Evening Hours.” Documenting uptown fixtures (Wintour, Tom Wolfe, Brooke Astor, David Rockefeller—who all appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between, Cunningham’s enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. In turn, Bill Cunningham New York is a delicate, funny and often poignant portrait of a dedicated artist whose only wealth is his own humanity and unassuming grace.”