A Dean's Classic: The Leisurely Pace of Bygone Days
2007.04.05
My passion is cameras. In this age dominated by digital cameras, I shut myself in a darkroom to manually develop film and make prints. I've converted one of the bathrooms in my home into a darkroom, and I persist despite criticism from my family. The feeling is indescribable when you place the photographic paper in the fixer, and after a while, the image gradually emerges under the red safelight of the darkroom. It makes me feel like a first-rate photographer. Black-and-white photography, of course.
It was a German camera, a Leica, that got me into black-and-white photography. It is the pinnacle of rangefinder cameras. One of my patients, a camera enthusiast, one day said, "Doctor, if you like cameras, why don't you try using this one?" and slowly brought out a gleaming silver camera wrapped in buckskin. It was what we now call a classic camera: a Barnack-type IIIF manufactured in 1948, a camera from before I was born. The feel and sound of the shutter release were indescribable. I was instantly captivated. Taking black-and-white photos with the borrowed camera and looking at them felt like returning to a bygone era. It's a very nostalgic feeling.
I still remember the feeling of the world I grew up in as a child, and the movie I saw the other day, "Always: Sunset on Third Street," captured it perfectly. I am passionate about cameras because they allow me to nostalgically recall that leisurely flow of time and to recapture a similar sense of time in my current life.
(Date posted: 2007/04/05)