And then this happened…

The year was 1993. I was 26 years old and sharing an apartment with my best friend who was a photographer. He had turned the bathroom into a makeshift darkroom and on many days I could hear him handling the chemicals, films and paper, cursing or cheering, depending on the outcome.

I really liked what he did, but for some reason it wasn’t for me. Maybe it was about patience which I didn’t have in abundance or the fact that I was focussing on playing jazz guitar in those days, planning to study at the conservatory in Arnhem, The Netherlands to make playing jazz my profession. It wasn’t to be, but that is another story. I rather spent the 90s touring Europe with funk bands from New York City, roaming Paris with buskers and experiencing massive changes to my life after reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.

Fast forward 20 years. At the time I was working as a bike mechanic and tour guide, traveling extensively. And after visiting Ireland for the first time and after that the greek islands in the Mediterranean, photographing those countries using a Google Nexus phone and a horrible HDR app, I thought there needs to be something better.

The next year, before I took off to Spain for the first job of spring, I bought a Nikon DSLR (I think it was a D3200) and took off. Ever since, I have stuck to Nikon DSLRs. It had to go digital before I could feel the urge to engage in photography.

Come 2023, I am happy with older cameras like the D200, D300 and D700, using an array of pre 2015 Apple computers to edit my photographs using legacy software like Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5.

But then I met an old friend again I hadn’t talked to for quite a while and him being a photographer he offered me an old Epson Perfection 4990 Scanner, which would perfectly fit in with the other older equipment I use. The other day I picked the scanner up and we got to talk about film cameras. Long story short – after three hours I left his house not only with the scanner, but also a Zeiss Ikon Trona camera from about 1930.

I know film photography is still alive, but large format photography was always something I could not really see myself doing, but there was always a curiosity there about how it would feel to go so slow. To have to choose very carefully what you ant to photograph. To learn the a bit more complicated process of working those cameras. Which is a simpler process though when you look at the cameras itself.

I would not be able to disassemble and repair any of the Nikon I have, but I could do that with the Trona. There is something about purely mechanical things I like, which is why I was a bike mechanic for quite some years. Bike or the Trona – if you stare at them long enough, you will understand how they work.

One reason at least for me to use these old gear and software for my digital work was that most of the digitally produced picture I loved had been made using similar cameras and computers as the ones I use. So it was only logical to come to use film at some point as among my favorite photographs are of course those by Adams, Weston, Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, Sudek and Evans.

For now I am planning on only studying the way this camera works and what I can do with it. I don’t have the space or the inclination (for now) to build a darkroom. I’ll use the scanner, which will give me a high resolution DNG file and from then on I know what I am doing.

But I’m afraid that eventually the darkroom will be necessary, but that’s further down the road. For now I am looking at this almost 95 year old camera, wondering where it has been and being so happy it ended up here on my desk. Asking to be used.

And taking me full circle.