From the Haugen Heart

40 years? You have got to be kidding! Neil's high school reunion was this summer and a good time was had by all. (He is the handsome devil in the white shirt standing on the right.) The Blues Brothers gave us a command performance and we danced and partied like it was 1971 (well, almost.) Big thanks to Danny Bisgarrd and the crew for putting this all together. I did not go to McNary (my reunion for West Albany is next year) but this group gets together every five years and have really made me feel welcome.

It is time to celebrate! No, I am not talking about the studio’s 30th anniversary, or Nels and Danielle’s upcoming wedding, or Anna preaching her first sermon to her home congregation, or Lars reading his first chapter book. They are all things in our life that we are celebrating right now. This time the spotlight is on Neil. Drum roll, please! Neil has earned his Master of Photography degree from the Professional Photographers of America! This is harder to achieve and therefore more meaningful than any academic degree. You earn merits toward the degree through teaching, judging, attending accredited classes and service to the organization but you must also prove your talent by entering prints in the PPA competition and have them accepted as "merit prints". That is the big challenge. Let me tell you a little bit about the process. Every year, you go through all the images you created over the last year looking for the very best. You can only choose four each year. Then you ta...

I (this is Neil talking) get asked every once in a while what is it that I do here at the studio, besides use a camera. Like many other things, my duties changed quite a bit with the switch to digital. I’ve always been the new information grunt of the studio , meaning that I am the unfortunate soul who is assigned to read about new or changed or re-discovered ideas or equipment that may be of use here in the studio. In another essay, I noted that we used the same cameras for twenty-plus years. The biggest “workflow” change in one long period of years came when we switched film speed, or sensitivity to light, of our basic film. We had to re-test to establish the best quality exposure at what “speed” or ISO rating, and then adjust our hand-held light meters to that setting. It took about five days, mostly waiting for the film to be developed a couple times as we tested and re-tested. Ah, the good old days. Now, our “film” (i.e., camera) needs changing every couple of years or sooner, as ...

It is just weird these days ... for the first 25 years we had the studio, a camera was a camera was a camera. And now, it isn't ... at least, it's not the same. The main "tool" we thought we worked with for all those years was the camera. By my third year, I'd settled on the Mamiya RB67, and we also purchased one for Miriam when she joined the business. We then used our RB's for the next 22 years . (That's the old RB in the image with me. Lotta metal, huh?) Now we change every cameras every couple years. Why? Well, it has to do with WHAT has changed with the digital revolution, and we’ll talk about that in a moment. Film cameras are either small format, medium format, or large format. Our old RB’s were medium-format cameras, as they used 120/220 sized roll film. The negatives it produced were 6x7cm, or roughly two and a quarter inch by two and three-quarter inches, with ten on a 120 roll of film, and 20 on a 220 roll of film. "Small" format came...