garrison beau scott

Another one of those scenes that just explode with visual sweetness for me and my camera. With all that is going on here, this was as simple as point and shoot.

With the few remaining weeks I had left while living in San Francisco, before the move East to Boston, I made sure to take whatever time I had to snap up a few remaining shots. This is the kind of scene I live to photograph. Something I can spot from a block away as interesting, but it isn’t until I get close enough to scope it out do I really begin to understand what the shot will be.

Not to over-dramatize things, but with a scene like this I guess I feel like a sculptor looking at a chunk of marble, walking around it to find the lines that will ultimately form the finished image.

I had been shooting with a Olympus OM2, 35mm camera for the better part of 8 years when Heather gave me a twin-lens Voigtlander for my birthday in 1999. This camera dramatically changed the way I saw things and consequently, changed the way I went about making pictures. With the waist-level view finder it felt like I had eye balls on my fingertips, I was able to see the scene in ways never before available to me with the OM2. I didn’t have to put the camera up to my face to compose a picture, just wave my hand.

My Voigtlander was built sometime in the 1940’s and had little in the way of “features.” It was manual in every sense of the word. To wind the film, I had to line up the number on the film backing with the little red window on the back of the camera. The focus rings were stripped and so I only knew when the camera was focused at infinity, all the way in, or to 3 1/2 feet, racked all the way out. Any distance in between was pure guesstimation. Needless to say there was no TTL metering.

With a renewed zeal for making pictures, I took the Voigtlander out and over the course of the next year shot with it whenever and wherever I could, eventually breaking it. I got some really cool pictures though before I had to retire the camera and turn it into a bookend. Here’s one.

I had seen this bit of graffiti one day on Market Street in San Francisco while riding the F Line and made a mental note to take a picture. A few months later I happened to walk by it again at night after a party. My initial picture didn’t justify the effort and it wasn’t until a few weeks later when I happened by it again that I made the exposure that became this image. A perfect case of learning from your mistakes. I have no idea what it really says and have come up with Choubmb, which I know has to be off. But what the hell…