BEST BUYS!

PHOTOGRAPHY has been around for quite sometime. Since the 1800’s to be precise. Most photographers nowadays are really just fascinated about their digital “toys”, strobes, and whatever it is they have in their black bags. To fully appreciate the beauty of photography you must know its history. The one that started them all is Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre with his invention of the “Daguerreotypes”. The formal announcement of this photographic process was made in Paris on August 19, 1839. Just an hour after the announcement, hundreds of customers flocked the shops to order this “picture-taking” device, less than a decade later – 2000 cameras along side more than half a million photographic plates were sold in Paris alone. This excitement would eventually conquer the world by storm.

You’re probably asking by now, “what’s the title got to do with this writing?”. The answer is simple. I just recently purchased a very exciting book from BOOKSALE at S.M. and I must say this is the best thing I ever bought for myself. It only cost me a whopping forty pesos. The title is Great Photographers, published by the TIME-LIFE BOOKS, New York in 1971! Beat that! I am personally not fond of clicking away in the internet especially when it comes to photography or its history. So long have I searched for a book like this one, and now I have it on my shelves. The book details and chronicles, well, as the title says – Great Photographers. It includes one of my most admired photojournalists of all time, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Seeing Bresson’s works on the book was both eerie and nostalgic.

I consider myself a very traditional photographer and also a perpetual learner in this field, always eager to know new things, except maybe Photoshop. I just don’t have the patience of hammering on the JPEGs using the tools. I have been clicking away on a camera since I was young and have my prints done in the shops, but the book gave me a chance to re-examine my works and it gave me back the excitement I had when I first developed and printed my first black and white photo using a darkroom somewhere in what is now called the City of El Salvador, Misamis Oriental. Thanks to the current Vice Mayor of the City, Hon. Teddy Bombeo, my professor in Photography back in college.

My first SLR camera was the Minolta X-300s, but somehow some of my students who used it a couple of years back – gave it back to me broke, that really tore my heart out but the lens was still okay so I gave to one of my students now who is using a Minolta SLR, so it still has a purpose after all these years of keeping it. The next BEST BUY that I have is my Pentax Super Program Analog SLR early this year. I got it from a guy who was trying to pawn in to me, but I managed to convince him to sell it to me instead. Because the camera is still in perfect condition, I never hesitated one bit, I bought it. I’m happy with the results of my test prints using this cam. One of my friends said to me: “bai, nganong ga-balik kas agi” (my friend, why are you going backwards?), I simply smiled and replied: “because this is what I’ve always wanted back in my hands”.

Thanks for reading. LIVE LIFE, ROCK ON! I’d love to hear from you, email me at shaun_alejandrae_uy@yahoo.com