Red on Blue Volkswagen

 

Red and blue -- the colors of Miami

(Click to enlarge)

 

In September, 1969 I got my first really good camera, a Nikon F. I was teaching at a small private school in Miami in those long-ago days and got a $300 bonus for something -- I don't remember what for. I knew I wanted to use the money to buy a better camera than the Ricoh Auto 66 twin-lens reflex  and the Petri rangefinder cameras I was then using, but wasn't sure what to buy. At the time Brown's Camera on Biscayne Boulevard had a like new Leica M3 with the 50mm f2 Summicron lens for $295 in his showcase. I fact, he had several of them. But a guy I knew offered me his Nikon F without a lens, but at a price low enough to enable me to buy a pair of Tamron lenses -- a 35mm and a 135mm, both f2.8 -- for a total outlay of less than my $300. 

So I bought the Nikon, because I wanted to photograph my school's football games and reasoned that the 135mm lens would be best for that. I have wondered ever since how my work would have been different if I had embarked on my career in serious photography with a rangefinder camera instead of a single-lens reflex. 

I made the above photograph in the fall of 1969 or early 1970. Can't say for sure, because I've lost the original slide, but it was either Kodachrome 25 or Kodachrome X, the 64-speed predecessor to Kodachrome 64.

Around that time, Popular Photography, the leading photography magazine in those days, ran two features in different issues -- The Colors of London, and The Colors of New York. They ran series of photographs showing that the colors of London were red and black and the colors of New York were yellow and black. 

If I had thought about it, which I hadn't, I would have supposed that the colors of Miami were pink and pale blue or perhaps coral and lime. But the red VW on a blue background opened my eyes to see pictures all around me that showed Miami in red and blue. I still have most of those photographs and would love to show you some of them, but they aren't scanned and I don't have time to scan them now because we are heavily involved with closing our house and moving. Maybe I'll come back to it later when things settle down a bit. 

This picture, by the way, was also important in helping me learn early on to see and compose each photograph to include only what I wanted in the frame and nothing more. 

Blog Note: I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings at alifeinphotography.blogspot.com. I'm trying to build up my readership, so if you're reading this on Facebook and like what I write, would you please consider sharing my posts? 

(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone