The Foundation

 Every great building has a great foundation. Similarly, every sport, profession or way of life has a great foundation. Photography has a great foundation. Unfortunately, all those iPhone photographers have no idea and have no regard for the history of the photographic arts while they are taking selfies. Cameras go back hundreds of years. There used to be something called a camera obscura. This was a series of lenses and mirrors that sat on top of someone's house and projected an aerial view of the surrounding city into a darkened room on top of this building. This , of course, led to development of some sort of way to capture an image onto a light sensitive piece of material. Before we were using digital sensors, “film” was a metal or a glass plate placed into the back end of a large view camera. Nowadays, it is not unusual for a newspaper photographer to cover an event then go to his car to process and transfer those digital images via a personal hotspot. The great Civil War photographer, Matthew Brady, would document the ravages of war with his view camera and glass plate film. He would then process those images in his horse drawn carriage which was his portable darkroom. Obviously there is so much more to the history of photography than I could write about here. I feel it is important to understand the history of anything we wind up doing professionally. If you are a baseball player, you need to know the great players that came before. If you are a young photographer trying to find your way, what better place to start than researching the great photographers that laid the groundwork. Names like Ansel Adams, Neil Leifer, Alfred Stiegiltz, George Kalinsky, Richard Avedon,  Jerry Uelsmann etc. The list goes on. Somewhere around 20 million sits my name. I get asked a lot of times how I got my start. Since I am a sports photographer, one of my first influences was the photography of the aforementioned George Kalinsky. He was the New York Knicks photographer. I used to go to the games all the time when I was in high school. (the early 70’s) I would marvel at the photographs in the program taken by Mr. Kalinsky. Now, here I am doing sports photography full time. I have even taken photos on the floor of Madison Square Garden sitting only feet away from the man I idolized. I could never get up the courage to speak to him, but his influence on my life has been long standing. 

So, to conclude, if you are looking for some form of influence as a young photographer, or you are an older photographer looking for a somewhat new direction to take your art, look to the past. You will be amazed by the images you see that were taken on film without the use of Photoshop. These people were the pioneers of photography. The image which heads this piece is my humble homage to Ansel Adams.