Another summer has passed out at Antietam. I shot this image of friends with a very old film camera.  I love the 180mm on my Mamiya C-330. I’m on my second camera body after wearing out the first one which I bought in the 70’s. When you grow comfortable with a camera, it is good to stick with it. I get a lot of teasing from fellow photographers for shooting film. It has taken a long time to get a comfortable with a palette that I love.

I was so lucky with the weather to get this photo. In Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, right near Frisco Pier, I’ve learned to wait for good images. They’re always worth it. On this day, the wind was blowing the tops off of the wave crests and the tide was going out, which created a waveless but stormy space between the beach and the cresting waves. The clouds hung very low, moving out to sea. The raw power of nature in the OBX can be felt…and if you wait long enough, captured on film to be revisited again and again. (With a little luck, that is.)

There are some teachers in life you never forget. Dr. Fasinelli was one of those teachers for me. He was a professor at University of Maryland. He taught art, photography and film. He was close friends with Lotte Jacobi. He spoke with a stutter, shuffled one foot as he walked, and had a
degenerative bone disease which caused him to hunch over. The jocks thought Film Classics was an easy credit and would mimic his stutter and laugh at him.

I was a jock, but I saw this man as a gift to those who wanted to learn. After graduating, I had dinner with him before he died. That is when he told me that he flew over 3,000 hours as a bomber/navigator in B-17’s during WWII. He watched Dresden burn and later visited the place after the war.

He never thought being a PhD was important. He didn’t have “Dr.” on his office door like all of the other professors who had that level of education. I learned a bit of everything for him. His film classics are still the bedrock of my visual lexicon.

I thank him every day I shoot…motion or stills. Every time I watch a movie, every art museum I go to, every piece of architecture I look at…I thank him.

I’m always curious to see how children see the world. I’ve found that when you bend down and take pictures of kids at their eye level, you see so much more of their character. This shot is on film. I try and try to get this look with a digital camera and Photoshop, but it’s just not the same. Call me old-fashioned. (Or just old.) Either way, I won’t be giving up my film cameras anytime soon.