An Early Chapter in My “Career” as Photographer

November 22, 1945

Hello you all,

   Well, I did it – I found & bought a camera & am now ready to spoil rolls and rolls of film. Of course with the weather we have today (snow) picture taken would be pretty tough. Yesterday afternoon was our last Chicago liberty & I bought this camera after I had searched for one for weeks. It’s a new Kodak, takes 616 film & cost 18 bucks with leather case – according to the experts, I didn’t get gypped – anyway – the price came out of a Kodak catalogue, making things fairly koscher. Now to take pictures!

   Perhaps I forget to tell you, but last Friday I wrote a very long letter to Miss Mayefsky to which I had an answer yesterday in super-speed manner. I am enclosing it but would like to have it back at once since I wish to answer it then. I hope you can read the writing – it’s about as tough as mine.

   I think it would be an excellent idea, if some time in the near future, you would invite Miss Mayefsky, Mutts – she’s about the only person that I can think of that knows about conditions & has no selfish reasons for her judgment. Besides that, she can be very nice & I’m sure you’d get along very well with her. How about it? [Nothing came of that: parental diffidence.]

   Yesterday I also received your letter, Junior and am very sorry to say, that I could not follow all of it. Though I did know what a pH meter is, I hadn’t the slightest idea how it works and how it’s constructed, though I got the idea that it works in such manner comparable to radio electroplating and a combination of other principles Anyway, let me know how successful you’ll be – you can use the thing to test the comparative value of lemons and soap!

   I like the way you dramatically accuse me of quitting science! I don’t quite think that things are as melodramatic as that. It is just that I made my plans too early – that of becoming an engineer – before I knew what else there was. I agree with you, that culture, etc. doesn’t exclude science – but it also doesn’t make it the mainstay. You’re looking for hidden reasons, which I’m afraid I cannot find – if you were more explicit perhaps I could answer you more completely. Simple I do not want to spend my life 1) in an engineering school being fed science, and 2) hanging my neck over a drawing board the rest. But by now that’s an old story. (Read Miss Mayefsky’s answer to the business – especially the first sentence). By the way, I’ve cursed at this pen enough by now – how’s the other one. Please send it up – insured – as soon as possible (to O.G.U.) (I mean my old Waterman’s).

   For now – that’s all so

                        Solong

                                    Rudy

* * * * * * * * * * * *

   There is much talk throughout the Navy letters related to photographing, as in the opening paragraph of that of November 22, 1945, above. After an extensive search through myriad boxes that had been brought, unexamined, from Pittsburgh to Mexico, I found a small one that contained the snapshots I took while in the Navy. I don’t know whether they are all of the ones I took; I do know, having looked at them for the first time since I came home from decommissioning the LST 919, that most of them are not very good. That fact partially accounts for the small number that has been included in the Kindle book of the letters; the other reason not to include is irrelevance, such as shots of the mountains near the Puget Sound.

   Because I had to go through a great many boxes of photographs I got something of an overview of a lifetime of snapping away. To be sure, referring to any kind of overview is thoroughly misleading. The pictures are more or less segregated—by the way they are boxed or stuffed into manila envelopes—by the time and place where they were produced. But with shamefully very few exceptions, no information about any of them is provided, neither what is pictured nor when the deed was done. 

   I don’t know that I actually envy the temperament of my very good (and old) friend, Jim Scanlan, but I certainly wish I had it at least part time. Jim went through all the photos he and Marilyn have—and I am sure that there are a great many—labeling them and transferring them to a disc. Jim is thus enabled to present slide shows about the different times and places of their much-travelled lives. 

   That is not going to happen to the immense number of photos I have taken in the many places where I have traveled. A very few have escaped the fate of just being shoved into boxes, most notably the many I took during the Northwestern trip to China, in the summer of 1977. But while they made it into albums, my patience did not rise to the level of having me identify them as to what—or who—is pictured and when. Sets about trips to Italy, Germany, Sicily, Colorado and points north, south, east, and west have not made it out of their unorganized homes.

   Mind you, many of these photographs are very good and some of them are really excellent. I’ve had a variety of cameras through the years, mostly chosen with some care and after consulting knowledgeable people. My last camera that used film, in harness for many years, was a splendid Nikon FE2 (bought used, but in good shape), made particularly versatile by an excellent zoom lens. My current digital camera is a modest but very clever little Canon with a zoom lens said to be of the Leica family. 

   While I have lacked the patience to minister to the photos after they are done, I have a lot of patience taking the pictures in the first place. I was quite competent in getting the various settings right—and I won’t here insert a distilled course in pre-digital still photography—instead, I want to single out one trait of mine that I think is probably the most important condition for producing images that are better than just blah. I am talking about the ability to determine just what to take a picture of. Call it an aspect of what is called having a good eye.

  When I say “to determine just what to take a picture of,” I don’t mean the decision to snap this mountain rather than that one or the view to the East rather than that to the South. But much more precisely, just what portion of the mountain should be in the picture, just how much sky and clouds, with or without that tree in the foreground—and more. Much of what might be contained in that course on still photography can no doubt be taught. But while experience is likely to improve that “eye” and have it go from OK to good to better, I don’t think of such progress as readily induced by a teacher. To use overly-simple labels, that course consists of matters that are technical: in situations like this, that is what you should do. On the other had, progress from good eye to better is to become more capable in making aesthetic judgments.

   Assuming there is enough time—not always the case when travelling—I have the patience to seek out that good picture, from searching for the “right” position from which to “take” the object to be pictured to manipulating the camera’s orientation and zoom (and more), before pushing the button that will produce the picture.

   Clearly, I am here thinking of pre-digital photographing where what you get is what you’ve snapped, unless you continue the picture-creating work in the dark room, a very different realm into which I have never ventured. In digital photography, post-snap editing is readily possible, from relatively simple programs like iPhoto to more elaborate (and difficult) ones like Photoshop. While I have never fully shed the practices I acquired when photographing with film, I have used some of iPhoto’s and Aperture’s editing features, creating a darkroom, so to speak, on my computer.

   Today, photographing, you might say, has become more “bipolar” than ever. On the one hand, there are the endless “selfies” and other shots taken with ubiquitous cell phones, the vast majority of them without much craft and never to be edited. At that pole, the creation of really good pictures is mostly a matter of luck. The high end is impressively exhibited in a show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, entitled “Perfect Likeness: Photography and Composition” [http://hammer.ucla. edu/exhibitions/2015/perfect-likeness-photography-and-composition/]. An immense variety of techniques, traditional and newly invented, are there on display in photographs that range from tiny to many feet across. An impressive exhibit of the ever greater versatility of the medium.

Your comments, positive or negative, are much appreciated.

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