Dinosaur Photographer

Lake Louise, (No.337) Banff National Park Alberta, Canada, September 2012. Copyright © Gary Nylander. Scanned from 4 x 5 negative. Ebony RW45 view camera, 120mm lens, T-Max 400 film. 


I was once called a dinosaur while photographing with my 4 x 5 view camera at a popular lake in Banff National Park several years ago. Another photographer saw me with my antique looking setup and called out to me "Hey dinosaur!" the comment was rather amusing and I felt flattered that I was "old school". After a friendly chat with him, he had told me that he too had been a large format camera user but had recently purchased a Nikon D800 digital camera (which had just come out on the market at the time). He was so impressed with the Nikon digital image quality that he stopped using his 4 x 5 view camera. When this photographer was telling me about how great his D800 camera was in comparison to his view camera and I believed what he was telling me.

To back up a bit, I started in the film photography days in the mid-1970s. By 1985 I was seriously into using a 4 x 5 view camera. Back then there was a reasonable justification for using such a big and bulky camera —it produced superior image quality retaining great detail while making large prints. It was the gold standard. When showing larger size prints the difference was obvious. Over the next three decades, I continued to use my view camera because that's the camera I owned and was comfortable using.

On my time off from my newspaper job at the Kelowna Daily Courier I shot a variety of subjects, mostly landscapes with the 4 x 5 view camera and sometimes even my 8 x 10 view camera. At the newspaper from 2001 to 2018 I shot all digital and loved it. From time to time I would run comparisons with my view camera and digital cameras and felt that the view camera was "The" camera to use for my black and white photography. I once did a side by side print comparison test in 2009 when a friend purchased a Nikon D3x with a 24-megapixel sensor, at think at the time it was $7000 (body only). The D3x was not a camera that the paper would want to buy and not something I could afford. The results of the print test were that the Nikon D3x was closer than I thought in terms of capturing fine detail, looking at a 12 x 18-inch print it was hard to tell which print was made with which camera, looking at larger prints the view camera started to show better detail.

When I first started using digital cameras in the fall of 2001 during my years as a staff photographer at the newspaper, my camera they issued to me at the time was a Nikon D1H which had a 2.7-megapixel sensor, I didn't think a tiny senor like that was much of a match for the much bigger size of  4 x 5 sheet film. There were many surprises and impressions along the way. The next year after having gone digital at the newspaper,  I made a thrilling shot of an Osprey feeding it's young. The photo was very popular among Courier readers and many prints were sold. One of the larger sized prints was 16 x 20 inches that ended up in the Harvard Art Museums. The print had to be of the very highest quality possible. I had a local photography shop print it on their then-new Epson 7600 with Sommerset velvet paper. That particular print did turn out to be very impressive, considering that the image of the birds had to be cropped to help fill the frame and that was all from a 2.7-megapixel sensor!

Since I left the newspaper business at the end of 2017, I continue to pursue my art photography and I also shoot some commercial freelance work. I needed some better digital camera gear for the commercial side of my work so I ended up choosing the best I could afford which was the Nikon D850, as I already had some F mount lenses. I have to say that the D850 with its 45 megapixels sensor is very impressive. I still find it amazing when looking at digital images from this camera, zeroed in at 100% with an abundance of fine detail is available. I keep thinking I'm looking at one of my scanned 4 x 5 negatives but without the grain.

I  also like to shoot with my 4 x 5 view camera and other film cameras ( 35mm, 120 even 8 x 10), although not I'm not quite ready to jettison the view camera entirely. However, I do wonder how I'm going to make use of this particular camera that uses sheet film which is getting more and more expensive as time goes on. Gone are the days when Kodak Tri-X 4 x 5 sheet film was 50 cents a sheet, one of my all-time favourite black and white films.

Now I am thinking of finding new ways to use my film cameras that I had not thought of the past.  The digital camera will also be of interest where I was once limited to shooting a few sheets of film on a hiking excursion I will now have more opportunities to photograph due to the fact that I would sometimes be out of sheet film and passing by interesting photo possibilities having used up my 18 sheets of film for the day.

It will be interesting to see how the future unfolds with my photography and what creative potential opportunities lie ahead.

FYI: Here is my blog post 4 x 5 view camera = Nikon D850

Carpe diem for a photographer

This is the story of a man with a camera and bird with a fish in it's talons. They were both hunters of sorts. A part of my job as a photographer for the Kelowna Daily Courier is finding pictures that are not attached to any sort of a story, at our paper we call it enterprising, grab the camera, head out on foot or by car and see what one can find.

 So there I was back in August of 2002 wandering around the north end of the Waterfront Park at Rotary Marshes in Kelowna, BC, on hot summer day, camera in hand wondering what I could photograph for the paper the next day. It was a quiet day with only a few people at the beach or people out walking their dogs enjoying the day, but I had lots of those kind of photos. Then I looked up and saw this osprey with what appeared to be a fish in it's talons. I attached my 80 to 200mm ( plus a 1.4 converter ) to my Nikon DH1 digital camera and zoomed in to get a better look, for sure the osprey had just caught a big fat fish and was taking it back to it's nearby nest where there just happen to be a couple young osprey eagerly waiting a fine fish meal.

 Just as the bird landed on the man-made nest the one of the young birds popped it's heads up to see what mom or dad had brought home. The fish which once lived it's life swimming in the lake was now food for the young osprey. I made a picture of this precise moment, this is what Henri Cartier-Bresson talks about being "The Decisive Moment".

 Later I went back to the office to download and edit through my pictures, the Courier had only switched from film to digital less than a year before. I plugged my card into a card reader at the photo desk in the newsroom, to see what I had photographed. There was really only one choice in terms of timing with the osprey landing on the nest. When one of my editors walked past the computer monitor, he said something like "Nice photo!".

 The next day the photo ended up on page three in black and white with a headline under the photo that said "Carpe diem" ( roughly translated to seize the day ). That day and the days after the paper received a lot of reader reaction with phone calls and a strong demand for reprints which we offered at the time for a reasonable fee. One of those calls was from a fellow by the name of Joe Yamaguchi, Joe was very kindly man and very enthusiastic about my osprey photo, he simply loved it. Joe also wanted a big print, bigger than what was normally offered by the Courier which was 8 x 10 inches in size. So after getting approval from the powers that be at the Courier, I went looking for a place in town who would print it for me at 16 x 20 inches, I took the digital file on a DVD to Photography West who printed it for me. I chose Somerset velvet as the paper of choice a beautiful mat surface paper. The print looked fabulous, it actually came out looking much better than I thought it would, being that the Nikon's digital sensor was only 2.75 megapixel in size.

 The story doesn't stop here. After giving Joe his print, he was so impressed that he gave his print to a good friend of his, who he had mentioned on the phone during one of our conversations, when he first mentioned his name I had not initially recognized the name, John Kenneth Galbraith ( who passed away in 2006 ). Mr. Galbraith was a well known economist who served in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. John Kenneth was living in Cambridge Massachusetts where Harvard University is located and was also born in Canada.

 Joe phoned me again, asking for another print the same size, as he had given the print he had to his friend Mr. Galbraith. I ordered another big print and when that was done sent the print off to Mr. Yamaguchi.

 In the meantime Mr. Galbraith was so impressed with my osprey photo, he though it should be in what was then called the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, its now called the Harvard Art Museums which include, the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985). Mr. Galbraith donated his copy to the Fogg Art Museum that meant I made another big print for Mr. Galbraith for himself personally. This time communicated with Mr.Galbraith directly and we also corresponded through letters for some time afterwards. I eventually received a letter from the Fogg Art Museum confirming that my osprey photo was officially accepted by the institution and that it had been donated by John Kenneth Galbraith.

 I would have to say that this photo has been one of the most popular photos with the general public I have ever taken in my 40 year career as a newspaper photographer. The photo went on to sell upwards of $2000 worth of reprints for the Courier.

 I think I was truly able to "seize the day" when I made this photo and perhaps for the osprey too as we were both hunting for something but with different objectives in mind.