Intellectual property

I hereby waive all copy right to the above digital image and release it into the public domain. 

-Writing with light:

At lot went into making the picture you see here. It all started 60 years ago when my grandfather took this picture of my dad.  Judging by the depth of field and the size of the print, it was likely a 35 mm camera with an aperture stopped down to at least f11. We can safely speculate that in Nyack NY, where they lived at the time, my grandfather had cut down a tree and decided to snap this image of his young son. At that moment, light from the sun reflected off the scene and entered the camera to cause a brief reaction with the emulsion coating a section of celluloid.  At that moment, my grandfather owned the exclusive right to copy and "own" the latent image that would form in the darkroom.  His rights to this photograph, I like to think, have been transferred to me by way of his estate, as well as that of the boy in the picture.  On friday it will have been 8 years since I saw him in person. 

In the life of the picture, it's a small step to take to the next assumption, that my grandfather might have actually printed the picture himself. He was a chemist by trade, and it would stand to reason that a chemist would have understood that soaking a silver halide exposure in an basic reducing agent would cause the positive image to form, allowing an acidic fixer to permanently preserve this image for our eyes so far in the future. While it may be that he had no such appetites, allow me this one delusion for my own edification.

Either way, the resulting print was with him until he died many years later. The evidence suggests it had a long life tacked to a cork board or maybe a wall.  On the bottom right hand corner, you can see some bright reflection, where you might be able to make out a scaly texture. The emulsion is cracking and breaking down. Just as the living, this photograph is fleeting.

-Old is no less valuable:

The picture finally came to us following our wedding. Several pictures were on display, and we were given this one after a recent trip back to Raleigh. 'Tis the season for people our age to be married.  But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. 

The next part of the story begins when I was the same age as my dad was in the original photo.  Pictures were the most interesting thing I'd conceived. I begged my parents for a camera. Fat chance.  Hope came in the form of a promotion from Kraft and the velveeta 110 camera. After eating tons of cheese, and sending in all the necessary upc's, I finally had a camera. I took all sorts of pictures. When my parents further indulged me by having them developed, I was crushed.  I had parallax, underexposure, overexposure, even weird problems sort of unique to a 110: (example here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/futurowoman/3067358118/). 

I took pictures out of necessity after that. I tried to get a little better as the years went by, but I didn't really understand yet what I was interested in about photography. Then came our latest wedding attendance last summer. Claire was a bridesmaid. Naturally, I had our Kodak easyshare point'n'shoot at the ready, and was prepared to overcome it's limitations using sheer statistics. By taking as many pictures as possible there *had* to be a good one in there. 

But there wasn't. I suddenly understood all at once that I wanted to know this art at a more fundamental level, and that consumer photography had put my focus on the abstract. I wasn't concerned with how things actually looked at the wedding, I wanted to record the event for it's own sake. We go through the day without actually needing to *see* anything. The result is that we all post pictures without actually *seeing* them. 

I've immersed myself in understanding photography. It's a steep learning curve. I bought a Nikon N90 and shoot black and white high resolution *film*, which I develop, archive (with contact sheets) and print myself. I have a condenser enlarger, and a diffusion enlarger which will work with medium or large format film. A few months ago I could not have told you how pictures were developed, and I would have discarded any negatives I got back. I would have told you that film was dead. But just because film is the "old" way of doing it, doesn't make it the *wrong* way of doing it. It certainly still has value; I can learn from it, and produce nice prints without having to order them online or buy some fancy printer that will probably not work with whatever computer I happen to be using.

Film means thinking more about the composition, the depth of field, the exposure. You have to get it right, or it will have been for naught. Learn or fail, the school of hard knocks can make you a quick study. 

-Technique:

I wanted to do something to preserve this picture, and continue my growth as a photographer. It was badly curling from moisture and age, so I had to first flatten it with clear plastic. Then I got an old loose lens and held it in front of my N90's 52mm manual lens producing a zoom effect. Claire held a flashlight with a napkin over it to provide soft light.  I opened the aperture all the way, since it's a flat image, and exposed it for 1/60th of a second. At that moment, I owned the copyright to the latent image formed on the emulsion of silver salts, much as my grandfather had so many years before.  

Using my condenser enlarger, I zoomed into the picture of my dad as much as I could and printed a handful of roughly 8x8 prints of this scene for myself and other close family members to enjoy. Each print cost maybe 60 cents (if we eliminate other "sunk" costs. ). 

It doesn't end there; it gets more complicated with the picture at the beginning of this post.  I took this picture tonight with our kodak easyshare. It has a 7.1 megapixel sensor and a fixed aperture. It has an automated flash setting. I held a piece of paper in front of the flash, which redirected much of the light to my face, which you can see reflected in the glass where my print is mounted. Since it doesn't have a wide depth of feild (high f stop numbers), either myself, or my dad would be in focus, not both. Since the point of this composition is to produce the reflection effect, that is what I want you to see, so that's ok. 

This "matryoshka doll" of a picture has elements from each stage in it's own life story, 60 years in the making. Who took this picture? I've spelled it out in certain ways that only a copyright attorney would care to understand, which is what I think is wrong with copyright law today. The real answer, the one that matters; "we did."

Please email me if you're concerned you might not be on the receiving end of a printing of this picture, and we can work something out. Chances are though, that if you want one, it's already on it's way. Happy Birthday, early and late. 

~EJ