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| Jeff Gin - Boris Riabov - Nicole Langdon- Davies |
It was in 1967 when I was in San Francisco that I was riding a cable car. A slew of young persons got off at a stop. I enquired as to where they were going. They told me that they were going to the San Francisco School of Art and that they were studying photography. That hit a chord in me as I was not aware that photography was art or that a career could be made with it.
It was not until my Rosemary, two daughters and I arrived in Vancouver in 1975 that I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a photographer. While washing cars at Tilden Rent-a-Car on Alberni my dream took some time and I found out why Alberta rentals had an electric plug in the front grill.
Then it happened. I became a photographer. I often tell people that there are three professions that do not need a college diploma. They are writing (I was paid well for doing it), photography (in the late 80s I was charging a $3500 day rate for industrial photography plus materials plus mileage) and prostitution ( I never tried it).
Now in December 2024 I see that photography in Vancouver is in a privileged position. Let me explain.
We have The Lab which is one of the last places in BC and in most of Canada that besides processing all film will also do Ektachrome (it is called the E-6 process). If you do not know how to print The Lab will do a good job of it.
We have Beau Photo which is a combination of photography museum, has the latest in digital technology in cameras and lighting equipment, has a huge fridge with film of all kinds including film you have never seen before. Important if you do not have the money to buy expensive lighting or camera equipment, you can rent it. The best feature of Beau Photo is their knowledgeable and helpful staff. They don’t intimidate and they smile a lot.
For those
old photographers like me (I am 82) who miss that institution on Granville
Street that was Leo’s, there is Jeff Gin who worked there for 30 years. He now
manages the Kerrisdale Cameras on Lonsdale in North Van. He will answer any
photographic question with no looking down on you if you happen not to have an
Apple computer but you own a lowly PC. My almost nearby Kerrisdale Cameras in Kerrisdale is also handy.
While I am mostly unable to convince some of my peers that I print inkjets almost every day with my frugal-with-ink-using Epson P700 and the amazing negative and transparency scans that I can do with my Epson V700, we live in a rich city with a long photographic history.
I did work in my darkroom for most of my life until we moved to a small house in Kitsilano. The West End Community Centre Darkroom Club has a fabulous darkroom with state-of-the-art enlargers of all kinds.
Beau Photo has a myriad of darkroom processing equipment for those who want to learn.
But few in Vancouver understand that one of the reasons Fred Herzog became famous (besides being a great photographer) is that for many years his Kodak Kodachromes could not be printed well by the standards of the darkroom technology of the day. It was the beginning of the scanner/inkjet combination that finally made his prints look like the slides he used to project in his home (I was a frequent visitor).
Inkjets of digital files, be they scanned negatives or slides, or files from your digital camera, cannot be replicated in the amount of shadow detail of the modern inkjet.
I believe that Vancouver is living in a photographic renaissance.
