Back in May 2009, Mike Johnston of “The Online Photographer” wrote a controversial blog post entitled The Leica as Teacher. (The URL slug of the post, a-leica-year, suggests an earlier title that I almost prefer.) Leica evokes a lot of strong emotions among a lot of people, but for me, as an amateur photographer who came of age in the digital era, it’s never been a brand that meant much. Still there was something in Mike’s post that intrigued me—and I wasn’t alone. It spawned an unusually passionate reaction in the comments (both for and against), and then two follow-up posts, essentially clarifying and expanding on his original proposition:
[If you] would like to radically improve [your] photography quickly and efficiently, I suggest shooting with nothing but a Leica and one lens for a year. Shoot one type of black-and-white film (yes, even if you’re completely devoted to color and digital, and hate film and everything it stands for. You don’t have to commit to this forever; it’s an exercise). Pick a single-focal-length 50mm, or 35mm, or 28mm. It doesn’t have to be a “good” lens—anything that appeals to you and that fits the camera will do. Carry the camera with you all day, every day. Shoot at least two films a week. Four or six is better (or shoot more in the spring and fall and less in the dead of summer and winter).
It’s funny because much of the spirit of the exercise I was doing already (thanks to reading T.O.P.): I was carrying a camera with me everywhere, and I was shooting with a single-focal-length lens (at the time, a Ricoh 28mm-e GR-D II, later a Pentax K-7 with a 35mm (53mm-e) lens). I wasn’t looking to “radically improve” my photography, but I was curious to see if I could play the same song on a different instrument, and how that might affect my visual perspective in the long run.
Unfortunately the timing was wrong. I was about to head to my brother’s wedding, where afterwards, while driving through Grand Teton National Park, I would begin scheming with Stephanie about taking a year off to travel. I was also on the cusp of buying my first-ever digital SLR, the aforementioned Pentax K-7, which I pulled the trigger on that August. Since we weren’t planning to embark on our travels for at least a year, I wanted to make sure I had time to get comfortable with the new camera before we left. Alas, “A Leica Year” wasn’t in the cards.
I’m not sure what’s more remarkable: that there was a time in the not-so-distant past when I didn’t bring a camera with me everywhere, or that in the present, everyone else has a camera with them at all times.
Ok, so apparently Instagram is more than just silly filters (though that’s been the sole extent of my usage), but when I recently stumbled upon some of my old cellphone shots, it struck me how Instagram-esque they were. Damn, I got to the party early! (Of course they’re not square, but I didn’t hold onto the originals, so I can’t recrop without making them even smaller.)
The first photos were taken back when I was still living in Santa Rosa and working for O’Reilly, while the later ones were taken after I’d moved to San Francisco and was working for Federated Media (2006-2008). Altogether these incidental little snaps capture moments from a period of great change in my life. So I thought it’d be fun to gather a smattering of them in one place.
From November 2006 until June 2007 (coinciding with my use of Ubuntu’s Edgy Eft v6.10), there was a bug in the old photo importer (or in Gimp, I’m not sure which) that failed to set the Exif orientation tag to 1 (aka top-left) after rotating a photo. This was solved in the following release of Ubuntu, though the fix was somewhat incomplete—as I wrote about in How to fix Eye of Gnome’s photo orientation in Ubuntu Feisty.
What this means is that the vertical photos I edited in Gimp during that time had an Exif orientation tag indicating that the top-left of the image was something other than the top-left as it appeared when I hit save. The funny thing is that Firefox (to this day) completely ignores this orientation tag. So I had no idea there was a bug lurking in the Exif metadata of the photos on my blog.
By this, our fifth photo book, I pretty much have the process down to a science. The code I wrote in 2007 and revised in 2009 still works, Viovio still exists and accepts custom PDFs. But that didn’t make the process any easier, considering that 2011 encapsulated the bulk of our travels—pretty much everywhere we went except New Zealand and Bali.
The front cover of our 2011 photo book is a photo from Varanasi
