The photographs on contact sheet #48 are from a variety of situations and a variety of times.

In the first of the photos, I am playing around with a new lens, a super-wide angle 18mm off-brand.  I learned over time that this lens had a loose element that would sometimes render the photos blurry.  It’s hard to get an out-of-focus photograph with a super-wide-angle lens because they have such great depth of field.  The blurriness wasn’t my incompetence.  There are a few photos of Atlanta Mayor Julian Bond surrounded by Cornell College students on the Orange Carpet of the commons.  There are a few photographs of Janet Paige (Kuller) near the Cedar River at Palisades Kepler state park. 

It is difficult now to see photographs as we saw them then.  Photography has changed between then and now.  For example, consumer cameras then came with one lens.  That lens was called a “normal” lens because it was half way between a telephoto and a wide-angle lens.  A professional camera could change lenses, but nearly every professional camera body was purchased with a “normal” lens.  Most professional photographers took their photos with the normal lens.  For some situations such as portraiture or sports, they used a telephoto lens.  Go back to look through the Look and Life and other magazines of the era.  Nearly all of the photographs are with normal or telephoto lenses.

I tended to shoot with a wide-angle lens, except for sports.  I felt that a wide-angle lens made me get physically closer to my subject and got me more involved in what they were doing.  Wide-angle journalistic photography was rare back in the day.  Perhaps it may give my older photographs a newer look since now people have zoom lenses on their camera phones, and their camera phone computers choose wide angle for the group selfies.

It was fun to have a super-wide-angle lens.  It required immersion in what I was photographing and created immersive photographs.  It is still fun.  If you look at my most recent photographs, nearly all are shot with a very wide angle.

I was impressed by how interactive Mr. Bond was with the college students despite how tired he was.  It was also among my first interactions with a celebrity.  I later recognized that some people make their photographic reputations by using celebrities as subjects.  It’s an interesting push/pull between seeing someone new and trying to reflect their persona in the photo. 

Janet was reasonably game in having her photo taken here.  She looks like she’s having fun.  I’m glad to see that in at least some of her photos.  It reminds me that what I see, or not, when I take a picture is different from what I see in the photo.  And what I see in the photo decades later.

The next set of photographs are along the south-east side of downtown Cedar Rapids.  I don’t know what drew me there then. 

There are a set of photographs from Altoona Hall at Cornell College.  Chris Dewey carrying a lit Jack o’ Lantern in this very flammable 19^th Century building.  The poster of Lenin that Mark Schulz brought back from Leningrad for our second-floor bathroom. 

And there are a set of photographs of the farms bordering the west side of Mount Vernon.  Janet and I used to take a walk every evening.  Though we met in a biology class, we grew together by taking evening hikes after dinner, before studying.  I felt that our relationship was built on our discussion, and some of the best were during our evening walks.  We continued our walks until our path together ended.  Here, I was shooting photos of what I saw, and I was seeing forms in farms.

The photographs referenced in this essay can be found in the Photos by Number galleries, #48.