Hello *again*

[william_spiropoulos1]

<p>Greetings folks<br>

It's been some time (8 years, to be precise) since I've posted to photo.net, and in fact I'd almost forgotten that I even had an account here until I recently steered my mind back toward film and remembered that I'd posted a couple of knuckleheaded questions about the Bogen enlarger I'd picked up dirt cheap at a Volunteers of America thrift store back in Columbus...ahh, but that was a long long time ago, before I'd moved to New Jersey and allowed my photography hobby to lapse...<br>

Visual arts wise, my background is in both traditional art and graphic design. I got the photo bug in college, when I took a class using my brother's Yashica Electro AX (great lens, so-so camera) and then my Nikkormat FT2 which I'd rescued from the trash. I've always been a film die-hard and before film became hard to find easily and cheaply I was happily shooting rolls and rolls of the stuff all the time--mostly street scenes and around my house, but I always got a lot of joy finding ways of making even the most mundane subjects look somewhat interesting. Along the way I've owned the Nikkormat, two Pentaxes (a K1000 and a ZX5), a Mamiya C330, a Canon QL17 GIII, a Sea & Sea Motormarine II (for a couple of dive trips I took), a number of assorted bits of extra gear, and even had the pleasure of using a Hasselblad 500C in a full studio setup for the semester I spent studying in Wiesbaden, Germany. The peaceful hours I spent in other peoples' darkrooms back in the day were some of my fondest memories, an almost meditation-like experience which I'm sure many of you are very familiar with.<br>

Life then happened. I won't go into all the details, but I had to unload the Mamiya and the QL17 for emergency cash, I found myself with less energy, time, disposable income to spend on taking pictures, and this new thing called digital photography came along, which I was ill equipped to indulge in. I did manage to get my hands on an Olympus Camedia (C-2000?) and kept shooting, but the overall experience wasn't the same, the camera was flimsier than my trusty old manual machines and harder to get to do what I wanted, and in any case when my PC self-destructed I lost a good percentage of the stuff I took with it anyway. When I moved to New Jersey, there was nothing like my beloved Columbus Camera Group (which I used to live two blocks away from) or Midwest Photo Exchange to supply cheap film, the old standby hour photo labs started drying up, and there really wasn't any local community of photographers to speak of other than people snapping selfies with iPhones. From working with film and rugged mechanical cameras at my leisure, I've gone to wringing whatever interesting photos I could from my LG Android phone. Some of which are not bad, but it is indeed a different world now...<br>

This is all about to change, though. The circumstances which led me to my self-imposed seven year exile have changed. I recently decided to move back to dear old Columbus, which has resulted in a sea change for me in many ways, one of which is that I intend to dive headfirst back into photography. Fortunately I never got rid of my core three cameras (the Nikkormat and two Pentaxes) or the rest of the incidental gear, and I want to try to take it seriously this time, perhaps even to branch out into fine art photography or other more serious work that I never got around to when I was still hung up on trying to focus on a graphic design career. I'm excited to soon be back near my best friend who was and is also a photographer (a superb one) and one of my biggest inspirations, not to mention the vibrant local arts community in Columbus which includes a lot more interest in photography than this backwater outpost of New York City has. 2016 will be an exciting year!<br>

Although I eventually want to finally get and *keep* a DSLR (I had to immediately sell the brand new Nikon D50 body I bought in 2008 for...you guessed it, rent money), my real love is still good old film, and I'm overjoyed to find that film cameras are dirt cheap on eBay, so I may actually be able to move back into medium format sometime soon. I'm also looking forward to finally having a basement of my own again, so I can finally, finally take that old $10 Bogen 67 Special and set up my own darkroom around it. It's been patiently waiting, in the attic of my old house, for me to come back, you know.<br>

And so, a fortuitous half-remembered question about that enlarger leads me back to photo.net, where I hope to be a lot more in the months and (hopefully) years to come.<br>

cheers<br>

Billy S.<br>

ps--All this talk about film and I haven't even mentioned my preferences. I've mostly gravitated to Tri-X for black and white, although I remember really liking Ilford films the few times I've tried them; I really loved the look of Plus-X too. For slides, it was mostly Ektachrome/Elite Chrome, and Fuji Sensia; I was actually underwhelmed by the couple of rolls of Kodachrome I tried (Kodachrome? What's that?). Color print film was usually whatever I could get my hands on cheaply, but there I generally preferred Kodak over Fuji which always looked green and yucky, which was probably also the fault of the crappy hour labs I used.</p>