An Old Dog Learns New Tricks

Smoky Mountain Homestead

At the Cherokee, North Carolina Entrance

to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Mamiya C220 twin-lens reflex, Kodak Ektachrome film

 

For 35 years I was a film photographer. My skills in using film were carefully developed and polished by many years of practice. I usually worked with slide film, which is the most difficult to expose properly, calculating exposures with a hand-held incident meter, which is more accurate than the meters built into cameras because it reads the light falling on the subject rather than the light reflected from it. To be ultra precise, exposures were bracketed by making additional ones a half-stop brighter and a half darker, then choosing the best one after the film was developed. I had a well-equipped darkroom and enjoyed processing color slides and black and white film myself. To this day I believe the majority of my best photographs were made on film.

In 2003 I made the switch to digital imaging with great reluctance and only because I felt it necessary to remain competitive in professional photography. I soon found that there were some skills common to both film and digital photography, but there were also new skills to learn. At the ripe age of 66 I began to teach myself Photoshop! And not just Photoshop, but numerous other software programs to learn. Learning software is not something I enjoy, but necessary to do digital photography at a high level. Even the film photograph of a Smoky Mountain homestead had to be scanned into a digital file before it could be posted on the internet. 

Sometimes it seems as if all I've done since 2003 is learn software! An old dog may learn new tricks, but that doesn't mean he will enjoy it.

 If you like my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph copyright the estate of Tony King. Text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.