After I had burned out my video cameras taking the 1990-93 material, I went back to regular film photography for a while and then - after my Nikon FM2 was stolen (and I couldn't afford to buy a proper replacement) I recorded things with words-only for a few years and then - in 2000 - got my first digital camera (with which I took the pictures in this post).
After not having taken any pictures for a few years, it was pure pleasure to be taking pictures again in the spring of 2000, and while film photography taught me to carefully compose pictures and think hard about how I wanted to compose them, I really appreciated being free of film and its need for development!
To this day, I'm glad I learned photography with a fully manual single-lens-reflex film camera, but have very little desire to go back to film now. True, the feeling of the camera and the experience of carefully taking one picture at a time I would like to revisit, but then to do anything with that, the film would then need to be developed and scanned, etc., so... banzai digital photography!
In one way or another I've been asked several times how/why I choose to record a certain scene. I've flippantly responded to that before by saying that I just like taking pictures, and enjoy taking pictures of whatever is around me, but - obviously - it's not that simple.
There are a whole range of reasons for taking pictures - from just wanting to experiment with what's at hand to see if an interesting element of it can be captured, to wanting to record the atmosphere of the area, to trying to record some of the essence of an era... etc. etc.
Technology and equipment... I was super-excited in 1990 to suddenly have a machine that recorded 30 frames per second simultaneously with sound! The early material was quite rough, as I had never used a movie camera before... and by the time I was getting used to taking video, I had burned out four expensive machines and had to stop taking video for a while (post bubble era with my lower paying post-bubble era income).
And in 2000, I was - in a way - even more excited by the digital still camera I began using. The problem with the video cameras is I was constantly thinking how best to use them, and since they were fairly fragile, I had to constantly take them in for repairs. And then there was editing, etc. Contrast all that with my first digital camera, and I was having all the fun of my film photography days with non of the difficulties, new medium learning phase, and frustrations I had experienced with video.
Naturally, the video material is more valuable now, but - at the time (in the year 2000) - I was having more frustration-free fun taking still digital pictures of that spring (all of the pictures on this page were taken on May 11th, 2000).
Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/ - lookback1997.blogspot.jp/
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