08 August 2002
Thank you for visiting my web site. I hope you enjoy looking at the images on this site. Your feedback will be greatly appreciated.
… with this web site is to express my thoughts, feelings, and perspectives through photographic images.
Photography has been a part of my life since I was a little boy. My father, using a Minolta rangefinder, took lots of slides throughout my youth; I was quite enthralled with the technology of capturing a moment in time and then recreating that moment sometime later on a large screen. I was 9 or 10 years old when I bought my first Kodak Brownie Bullet (127 film) camera at a garage sale for $1.00. When I was 11, a wonderful elementary school teacher, Alvin A. Kanno, taught some of us 5th graders how to develop film and make enlargements. I still remember the indescribable joy at seeing my first 8x10 come to life in the developer tray! Some of my classmates and I would go to the school on Saturday mornings to do more and more of this work in his classroom. After that school year, I bought Mr. Kanno’s enlarger (he wanted to upgrade) along with tanks, trays, easel, tongs, and all the essentials needed to do darkroom work at home. My sisters were none too pleased with the way I took over the bathroom for hours at a time. Before long, my father built a darkroom in an alcove in the garage. Over the course of the junior high and high school years, I upgraded my enlarger, my cameras (several times), and my skills. In high school, I was fortunate to encounter another gem of a teacher, Skip Loomis (“Loomie”). He had a classroom, a darkroom, and a studio all grouped together. It was here that I learned about the magic (and pain) of medium format, and I branched out from my comfort zone (landscapes) into portraiture. The atmosphere was wonderful! Popular music of the day (mainly Styx and Supertramp) was playing loudly on the sound system. Structure was there for those who needed it; a deliberate removal of boundaries was done for those who didn’t. Annual trips to Yosemite Nat’l Park in April were amazing introductions to Ansel Adams’ world. Several of us flourished in that environment. After high school, my parents paid half (my graduation present) for an ever-so-slightly used Mamiya RB67 system with 3 lenses. I later added 2 more lenses. What a system (and what an arm-builder, especially when hiking with it)! The camera (candy) store that for a few years had claimed nearly all of my income, Photography Unlimited, became my employer the day after graduation. I learned a thing or two about sales, and was trained in matting & framing of pictures. I had many mentors and friends who influenced my photography over the next few years. It was a dream to become a National Geographic Photographer, but I eventually drifted from the artistic inclinations toward more technical directions – chemical engineering first, then computer science.
Several years later, after having started my career as a software developer and my life as a family man, I took over a room in my house and made it into a darkroom. This was as “real” as life was going to get, and I was in serious withdrawal. I studied Adams’ Zone System, did lots and lots of calibrations of my equipment, film, chemicals, and process, and then turned my new education toward landscapes again. From a technical standpoint, they were surprisingly good (relative to my previous work); I had gained some control over the tonal range of a scene, and had richly vibrant images as a result. Unfortunately, that first batch of “zoned” photos, while technically superior, were aesthetically dreadful. I believe that I was so focused on the technical aspects of the exposure that my artistic inclinations were thwarted. I programmed an HP48S calculator to take light meter readings and desired zones corresponding to those readings, and produce a set of exposure combinations (aperture, shutter speed) along with a development adjustment (eg. N+1) to achieve the desired zones. Using this program, I didn’t need to do the calculations anymore, and my artistic abilities were no longer impaired; I began to achieve some very satisfying results. It wasn’t until a few years later, after taking an intensive, week-long course from Dr. Betty Edwards on “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”, that I understood more of what was going on with the number crunching interfering with my creativity. As Betty explains it, the left brain (“L Mode”) tends to dominate the right brain (“R Mode”) for many of us; doing calculations, while fun in its own right, was precluding my right brain from doing its thing. As soon as I took away the left brain’s opportunity to dominate (by off-loading the calculations to a hand-held calculator), my right brain was able to stay engaged in the process.
A few years later, I had bought a small digital camera. I bought it for snapshots, whiteboard captures, and photographic directories of students with whom I was involved. To my surprise, the little “point & shoot” was actually good enough to do some real photography, so I took it with me on a trip to Zion Nat’l Park. Something significant happened on that trip. The fundamental economics of photography are radically different with a digital camera. No longer is every image (and, most importantly, every failure) a financial cost (in a sense, there really is a cost still, but it is abstracted away by a predominantly up-front expense on the camera and the memory cards). Pictures that I would (and did) pass up thousands of times before (because they weren’t likely to be “winners” and I didn’t want to spend money on “losers”) were suddenly worth trying – there was nothing to lose. I took a few close-ups of dead leaves; these ended up being my favorite shots of the whole trip! This small success reignited my interest in photography, and opened up a vista of macro photography that I had never before pursued. Many of my flower pictures were the result of this ignition. Eventually, my demands for optical quality, resolution, and control exceeded what the 2 megapixel camera could deliver, so I was driven back to 35mm. I sold nearly all of my older A and F series Canon equipment (eBay was very good to me) and used the proceeds to buy Canon EOS equipment and a few marvelous lenses. I also bought a Nikon film scanner (see, Ford and Chevy can co-exist), and began shooting slides on Fuji Provia 100F (mighty fine color and fine grain) and then scanning the ones I like to have digital images again. While this is nowhere near as immediate or inexpensive as direct digital photography, I’m getting some satisfying results. Eventually I’ll buy an EOS digital camera body on which I can use my new crop of lenses, but for now I’ve got a lot more resolution with my A-D solution, and I’ve saved a lot of money.
I have a small side business of doing family portraiture and matting & framing. I like this work and it is much more social than doing landscapes or nature photography, but I believe I am accomplishing more from an artistic standpoint in my non-people photographs. I have thought about selling stock photography, creating desktop (a.k.a. “wallpaper”) and screen-saver images, and even scrapbooking papers – all of which are potential avenues to generating some revenue from my avocation – but I am already quite pleased to have the means of expressing myself through this medium. Since I do harbor some aspirations for making money with my photography, I ask that you not use the images from this web site for commercial gain. If you are interested in larger (higher-resolution) versions of any of these images, please contact me. If you just like the pictures, or have some suggestions that would improve my work, I would enjoy hearing from you – drop me an e-mail.
Enjoy!
Jerome Broekhuijsen