How a Camera Saved My Gray, Old Grumpy Ass


I was found freezing in an alcoholic coma on a railroad track in Maryland.

I woke up in a Veterans Hospital psychiatric ward.

A social worker visited me and said, “Craig, you’re taking disability this time. No questions— This is it.” (I had refused disability for my PTSD, since I thought the free money would turn me into an alkie.)

The psychiatric ward kept me locked up until my first check of $20,000 landed in my bank account. Before they let me loose, another social worker escorted me to his office to show me his wall of B&W photography. He said the camera saved him from the bottle.

So I bought a Canon Rebel kit from BestBuy and hopped on the California Zepyr to San Francisco.

I spent 16 days roaming the hills of San Francisco with my new dSLR and took thousands of exposure. Didn’t get drunk once.

But I did find the old Dakota Hotel on Post & Taylor where a carload of Berkeley girls spit on my uniform, yelling from their car, “Fucking baby killer!”

Now I live in Downtown Chicago (very photogenic) surrounded by lots of camera equipment. While photographing Chicago, people ask me if I’m a professional. “No. Just a sober enthusiast.”

The moral of this story: Buy grumpy grampa a dSLR and push him out the door.

This is not the way a hard drive works. The heads write and retrieve the data from the surface of the drives without touching the drive platters. If the heads had touched the platters you would probably not be able to retrieve anything from the drive. To the system the data is just 0's and 1's. It doesn't know that it is a photo or a text document when it's retrieving the parts of the file. I would suggest that you look elsewhere for the problem. Possibly a software or video issue. Have you tried viewing the files on a different system?

As a long working pro during the "film era" of photography, I had the great pleasure of taking photos with magnificent precision made machines from the likes of Hasselblad, Leica, and Nikon. When the digital wave hit I considered quitting photography rather than be forced to take photos with a plastic computer with a lens on the front. I know any change is hard, but I can't help feeling the camera companies sold their soul when they allowed the young computer geeks to completely design the new cameras. There was no transition from manual controls, it was a jump right off the cliff into digital oblivion. Many of these designers were too young to have even experienced the joy of a simple three point control of a photograph. The idea that there was no need to take your eye off the subject to read a menu and lose the shot.

Then along came Fuji to save the day with their great camera controls. When I shoot with the GFX and X cameras they allow me, once again, to forget about the equipment and concentrate on the subject.

Perhaps my greatest disappointment was the way Nikon introduced their greatest achievement to date, the Df. The price was too close to the D810, a simple $300 reduction would have probably doubled the sales. Then they called it retro.....what the h___ is retro!? Com'on Nikon, it's not about the looks, although it helps, people bought that camera because of the controls. I know I did. Which brings me to my point.... Am I the only one who would like to see one of the Nikon Mirrorless cameras come with Df/Fuji style surface controls? I am really surprised no one has mentioned this.

I've spent a lot of time studying the "rules" of photography from many different experts. I studied the rule of thirds, the rule of lighting, the rule of shake your left leg three times, spin right twice, jump once, and howl at a full moon on a Tuesday. I studied the rules for macro photography which happens to look like the rules for landscapes and nightscapes and portraits and photography in general. Oh, let's not forget the final all the experts tell you at the very end, that's break all the rules.

I've come to the to the following conclusion; there are no rules, zero, zip, nada, the big goose egg! The real title should be Here's a list of things to mess with to help you learn your camera until you figure out what you want to do.

Photography is an art! The photographer is an artist! It's totally up to the artist to decide what to do and how far to take their art. Anything anybody says is merely a suggestion of what that person would like to see.

Yes, I'll still look at what others are doing and saying. I've come across many suggestions to try or at least spark a part of my imagination. Sometimes one leads to the another.

Whether you shoot for a base for a picture maker or for straight out of the camera or to simply record a moment in time to prompt your memory later or whatever else, own it like a boss, cause it's all good.

So on that note. I'm going back to playing with my camera and look forward to seeing what others create. As for the rules? What rules? I don't know no stinkin rules.