California

Aaahh, California. Everybody who travels to the US gets sooner or later to California. A ecology sensible, bankrupt, non smoking state that hosts also the IT heart of the world as well as Hollywood and the LA gangs. Actually, I’ve never been to LA. Not sure I’ll go there some day. Too big of a city, nothing to see or to do there when the rest of the state is such a jewel.

Ever been behind the Yosemite park ? There’s a complete unexplored & forgotten area of California with ghost towns, high altitude plateaus, fantastic views, western movie shooting sites, forgotten sleepy towns, it’s just lovely. Next time you get to this side of the US, go there.

And of course you’ve got the Death Valley, SFO and all the stuff around the national parks, but this is pretty well known.

As far as I can remember, I’ve been always interested in photography. I got my first camera at 14 and yet I had already been playing around with photographic expericences before that which triggered my curiosity.Actually, it all started when…at the age of 13, I had to build a cardboard chamber at school. Luck had it that I stumbled over a box of old photographic paper right afterwards. It was indeed still good enough to experiment around with it in that chamber and I managed to produce some negative pictures – actually quite primitive – but terribly impressive for a self made ‘camera’ and its amateur photographer. Soon I was dipping the paper into chemicals to fix the results and I ended up wanting way more than this. Enough of playing Monsieur Daguerre, I wanted to make real pictures. I got then offered an old camera from my grandfather that dated back to the 60’s. Fine for a start but I quickly reached the limits of this touristic device claiming for more. I had to wait until I was 16 or 17 to afford a used Reflex camera – my first one for the unbelievable sum of 150 DM (I still have it and the shop where I bought it still exists too). That Praktica was robust and derived from a Minolta design, a brand of which I’m still a strong supporter today. Armed with a 50mm f2.5 and an embedded light meter in the camera, I was finally fully entering the word of photography.

Later on I went into film development and used sporadically my fathers X300 Minolta equipment. Life has its up & downs and most of the produced material got lost over the years. When I got the first digital camera in 2000, it was a big change. Pictures were really poor but the possibility to see the immediate result was a revolution. 2001 was the year of digital photography coming to the masses and I got a Minolta E203 that lasted a year before it got stolen. Indeed, it was clear that with 2Mpix, pictures were approaching acceptable levels and in 2005 I got my first digital DSLR : a Minolta 5D. From there it went crescendo over to the 7D, then the current Alpha 700 and around 20 lenses.

Today – as in the past – I’m still shooting pictures where ever I go and am. I’m still using film cameras (film is really a world apart) and my main focus is to catch things before they disappear. Time & trends tend to gnaw at things from the past and our duty as intelligent beings living in an educated society is not to forget our past. Hence many of my pictures might not be perfect regarding the art but it was then not the point. Some are, when it comes to do Portrait or other exercices, some are not. I like to freeze on film or digital media that world we live in and when it comes to that, only the information counts. As of this some pics get shaky or even boring but will reveal all their value in some years.

Enjoy the site, leave feedback if you like a picture and keep in mind that I’m always open to critics & comments.

Deanza7 – Oct 2013

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