Chuck Hatcher

Welcome to my journey. I’m on a mission to find the excitement and enjoyment that cameras once brought me. I started this blog for two reasons. The first is to share my experiences as I attempt to rekindle interest in an old hobby. The second is to give myself some extra incentive to stay on track and see the project through to wherever it leads. I tend to lack self-discipline, and I often drift from one interest to another. Hopefully making a commitment to publish an ongoing account will add just a little structure and organization and help me keep my focus.

I am not a photographer. At least, I am not what I consider to be a photographer. I have always been fascinated with cameras, and lenses, and attachments, and accessories, and I do like using them. But I have always felt I lacked creativity. I suppose I have never been artistic. While I learned to play musical instruments, I did so mechanically and without expressing feeling or passion. My drawings can be technically accurate, but they do not rise to the level of art. I can assemble a coherent sentence, but I am not able to write good fiction. And so it is with my pictures.

So this journey is not about me learning to use the tools of the trade to make better photographs. It’s about me exploring and having fun with the tools of the trade, in my own way. If a good photograph “happens” along the way, I can assure you it was just a happy accident. Maybe you are a photographer. Maybe you don’t care so much about hardware or gadgetry. Maybe you only want to learn more about your camera so you can exercise your creativity in a new way. If so, welcome to my workshop. I hope I can provide some small bit of information that will find it’s way into your art.

My first “serious” camera was a Yashica 635, an all-manual, twin lens reflex camera that took both 120 and, by means of an adapter, 35mm film. I bought it second-hand from my uncle when I was about 14. No autofocus, no program modes, no light meter, no battery, and sorry, no memory card. With it I learned the rudiments of photography. Load the film, wind the film, cock the shutter, set the aperture, set the shutter speed, focus the lens, compose the picture in the waist-level finder, and press the shutter release. Hear the nearly inaudible click as the leaf shutter trips. Wonder if the image seen in the finder was actually recorded on the film. Learn patience – there was no LCD panel on which to preview the image. Repeat. When the roll of film was full of latent images, remove it from the camera and load it into the developing tank in a lightproof black fabric changing bag. Pour the magic chemicals into the tank in the specified order at the specified temperature at the specified times: developer, stop bath, fixer, wash water. Remove the developed film – now monochrome negatives – from the tank for the first peek at the newly visible images. Hang the film to dry, and then cut it into strips. Head to the darkened bathroom to make contact prints – I didn’t own an enlarger. This was my photographic process at that time. You had to learn the tools and the chemistry. This was the early 1970′s. The microprocessor had been invented, but it was still a military secret and certainly not to be found in any camera. The home computer was a dream of science fiction. By the end of the decade, the world would be a very different place.

My next camera was another Yashica, an Electro 35 GSN, a 35mm rangefinder model with fast f1.7 lens and automatic aperture-priority exposure mode. I bought it new at Woolco, and what a technological marvel it was. I was now less involved in the photographic process. I still had to load the film, but now I had a rangefinder for quick, accurate focusing, and I didn’t have to worry about exposure settings. I shot color film and dropped it off at the drugstore for processing at a lab in another city. The color chemistry and printing were beyond my capabilities and my equipment budget, so my hobby became less technical. I got better results with less effort, but somehow it was just too easy. So in 1981 I went for something a little more complex, a Minolta X-700 SLR. Now I had a real “system” camera with an endless array of available lenses and accessories. Of course I could only admire them in the slick, glossy brochures and pore over the mail order ads in the pages of photography magazines because most of the equipment was beyond my budget. But over the next couple of years I did buy a few lenses, a motor drive, and some other odd items, and continued to take pictures. I was a sailor at the time and a darkroom was not an option, so I was still dependent on others to process my film.

Time passed, my priorities changed, and my photography hobby became dormant. When it next awoke, in the early 1990′s, I traded all my Minolta manual-focus gear for a shiny new Maxxum 7xi. I’d be ashamed to say how little I got for the MF stuff, and I still wish I hadn’t parted with the 50mm f1.2 lens, but the autofocus 7xi was a big step forward in technology, and decent pictures required less effort than ever. Within a couple of years, somehow, and I can’t remember exactly how, I got into the part-time camera trading business. I’d buy through local newspaper ads and Internet forums and rent tables at camera shows on the weekends. Along with a full-time job, this made for a sometimes grueling schedule, but I did get to at least briefly own and handle a lot of really nice gear, some new and some old. And I got to witness firsthand the collapse of the film-based photography business. Digital was still inferior to film but the handwriting was on the wall, and for many purposes the inferior quality didn’t matter. Finally I had the space for a darkroom, and fantastic deals could be had on enlargers and other darkroom equipment, but I could see enough of the future to know that for me, it no longer made any sense. Soon digital image quality and photo printers would be good enough for any purpose I might have, and to be honest, I never liked having to wait for film developing anyway!

So the next few cameras I bought were low-end digitals – first a little Casio for taking eBay pictures for a part-time antiques and collectibles business. Then an Olympus D-600L Zoom SLR which really showed me that I no longer “needed” a film camera. These were not “hobby” cameras, just tools to be used when I needed digital pictures. My photography hobby was “asleep” again, and it was not to reawaken until 2007. At that point I was suddenly smitten by the Leica M8. The M8 was expensive, particularly for a non-photographer. But the expense of the camera was just the beginning. There was the vast Leica System – seventy years or so of lenses, attachments, and accessories produced for the Leica, and the M8 is compatible with most of them. So I became a Leica accessory junkie, and bought a shameful number of ancient contraptions to attach to my new M8. And I had fun with it, if only briefly. Once again, other priorities competed for my time and energy, and my interest waned. Until now. Last month, a friend was called upon to serve as executor of the estate of an amateur photographer, and because of my past experience trading cameras and selling on eBay, he came to me for assistance liquidating some photo gear. To my wife’s dismay, I bought it all, with the idea of playing with some and selling anything of value that I didn’t want. Among this gear was a Nikon D60, with 18-55mm and 55-200mm DX VR lenses. Now remember that the only modern digital camera I had ever owned was the Leica M8, which despite its high price, workmanship, and image quality is not what you would call a “full featured” camera. And the last amateur SLR I had owned was a film camera. Well of course, I gave the D60 a try. And I liked it. Enough to get interested in photography all over again. And I concocted a brilliant plan that involves having a lot of fun with cameras, 100% financed by the sale of my Leica M8 and related equipment. And so my journey begins…