Bio - Bob Long

[boblong@xxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Long)]

On Thu, 18 Jul 1996 00:56:39 +0200, you wrote:

|- Name:
Bob Long  (as a byline: Robert Long)

|- Profession/Study: 
Freelance writer/CD reviewer/desktop publisher/photographer,
approximately in that order.

|- Country: 
USA (born in Canada)

|- Personal history of photography 
Brownie roll-film camera and a Kodak Bullet in the 1930s, when I was
little more than a tot. In the 1940s my dad gave me first a Kodak 35
(f/5.6 lens) and later my first roll of Kodachrome.  I've been hooked
ever since.  In 35mm worked my way up to a Contax III, then a Nikon
rangefinder (pre-S).  Then got sidetracked by a 3.25x4x25 RB
Autograflex (never knew what the RB meant), a Crown Graphic, and
finally a Speed Graphic that I still use on occasion.  Then I bought a
couple of Nikkormat Ftns (1970s) and FE-2 and FM-2 bodies (1980s-90s).

|- preferred subjects:
Landscapes, nature, cityscapes, macro

|- materials (film, filters, paper, chemistry):
Started out with Plus-X and Panatomic-X.  Then for years it was all
Kodachrome, with some unsatisfactory experiments with Anscochrome and
Agfachrome.  Then I discovered IR Ektachrome and unreal color.  That
got me into doing regular Ektachrome.  In the meantime, when I started
freelancing, I went back to b&w and used every film and developer I
could get my hands on.  Much of the Graflex photography was on Plus-X.
The 35mm work was one extreme or the other: Adox with Neofin Blue or
Ethol TEC, or Tri-X or Super Hypan or HP3 with D-76 or 777 or
Accufine.  Later on I tried 4x5 Litho film--right in the camera--and
IR.  My best IR shots were on 4x5 of the San Gabriel Mountains, just
behind Pasadena, Cal., following a snow.  More recently I got into a
different sort of unreal color with Kodak PCF while it lasted and more
recently with Velvia.  And last year--and I swear without knowing
anybody else had done the same thing until I started reading these
posts--got the urge to do studies of old graveyards among our New
England hills, using HIE.  I no longer have my own darkroom, which is
a drag, but I started to lose interest in printing after DuPont
stopped making Varigam.  The computer (mostly PhotoStyler, though I
use Corel 4 and the limited editions of Photoshop and Picture
Publisher; the full Photoshop is on order)  is very gradually taking
over processing chores, but nonsilver photography still seems a long
way away.  In the meantime, there's the Photo-CD...

|- format (35mm/medium format/large format): 
Yes.

Oh: I also have an antique 6.5x8.5 view camera--natural cherry wood.
Seldom use it.  Requires *very* fast film; I don't know how they
managed when the camera was new.  Took some gorgeous shots of a road
overhung with Spanish moss in South Carolina.

|- Other strange hobbies:
Motorcycling.  Great way to travel, because you really experience the
land you go through.  Unless it rains.  Riding in a car is like
watching TV by comparison.  Did 4000 km in 2 weeks while doing
interviews for a story on Scandinavian hi-fi and almost caught my
death in the downpours.  (Favorite spot on earth: Grosse Morne
National Park, in Newfoundland, despite the rain.)  Outside of keeping
your cameras dry, motorcycling and photography mix well because you
don't have to stay on the roads and you can stop the bike almost
anywhere to take a picture.

A sizeable collection of 78s, particularly operatic from the 1920s and
1930s, used to absorb a lot of my time, assembling them onto tape in
ways that would simulate performances of the era (say, all I could
find of Rigoletto with de Luca, Galli-Curci and Schipa or of Trovatore
with Wittrisch, Teschemacher, and Klose), but it's too hard to get
adequate equipment to do it today, and the CD transfers have improved
so remarkably that the commercial products now sound much better than
mine--which wasn't the case fifteen or twenty years ago. 

|- How did you find out about this list:
>From its proprietor/founder/deus ex machina/whatever.

|- Expand on anything photographic you like:
A favorite subject is why the way in which fisheye-perspective lenses
(e.g. the 16mm Nikkor) distills our four-dimensional space-time world
onto a two-dimensional picture is arguably closer to the way humans
actually see than is the conventional "Renaissance" perspective of
most lenses.  In fact, I'm presently at work on a book (Eye & Camera -
Imaging a four-dimensional world in two-dimensional pictures) in which
this is a major theme.

My second-favorite subject is Nadar (a.k.a. Filix Tournachon), the
great portraitist who took almost everybody who was anybody in French
arts and letters circa 1860--fascinating character--and, partly
because of him, his whole world in bohemian 19th Century Paris,
beginning with his friends: Jules Verne, Jacques Offenbach, Charles
Baudelaire, Henri Murger, Gustave Dore, Honore Daumier,
Constentin Guys, Edouard Manet, the Brothers Goncourt, and on and on.

bl