Thad's Photos

Versailles Chapel
Chapel at the Palace of Versailles, Versailles, France. August, 2004.

Welcome to my photography section of my web page! I've been interested in photography since about as far back as I can remember. I took a photography class when I was about 10 years old. I used my father's 1960s rangefinder, learned some basics and shot some black and white film. We developed the film ourselves, and made 8x10 prints in the darkroom. I still have those prints! I know I didn't fully grasp the whole point of aperture and all that sort of thing, but the fun of developing film and making prints stayed with me.

But it was always intimidating. 35mm SLR cameras were horribly expensive and complicated looking. Not to mention the expense of buying and developing film, without any clear idea if I could be any good at it. I took snapshots with various 35mm point'n'shoot cameras and really didn't think too much about it.

Then in 2001, I bought my first digital camera, a 2 megapixel point'n'shoot Canon PowerShot S110. Like many people, without the cost of film and developing, I took way more pictures and became way more experimental. This, plus a free Pentax K1000 film SLR, re-ignited all that interest I'd had in photography all along.

Now, I spend an inordinate amount of my free time messing around with photography. My main camera is a Canon EOS M6, an APS-C mirrorless interchangeable lens camera. For me, it's the right balance between quality, flexibility, size and price. (ie, I have no plans to ever buy a full-frame DSLR, because I know I'd never bring it with me now. Too big to be bothered with.) Plus, those old film cameras, once so prohibitively expensive, are now pretty cheap to pick up and experiment with. I've even developed black and white film and made my own prints again.

I read Ansel Adams's three-book series on photography: The Camera, The Negative and The Print. It's an interesting series, particularly The Negative, and its discussion of the Zone System. In this world full of books "for dummies", it's really refreshing to read a book that never talks down to you, yet makes technical details perfectly plain.

The photos on this page (below) were last updated in 2005. My most recent photos are on my Flickr Photo Stream.


Travel, Architecture and Places


Lehigh Campus '99

NEPA '03

Sudbury Aqueduct '03

Colorado '03

"Manly Man" weekend '03

France '04

Independence Day Weekend '05

Bethlehem '05

Musikfest (etc) '05

Minneapolis and Yussen Wedding '05

Mount Carmel '05: Roots


Other...


My Mazda 6s

Owen and Scotty '04

Jaguar Concours 05

 

10/15/2008 © 2005, 2008 Thad Jaszek