When I entered university I had an omnivorous appetite for learning. I wasted a lot of time with stuff like Geography and Psychology on top of the basic sciences. Geography suddenly paid dividends, half way through my first year. The professor saw my maps and I was commissioned to draw for the department - for money. Not much its true, but it was a great help. Later I wrote an illustrated article and the publisher contacted me. Soon I was drawing for them as well. This time for much more money. These were small line drawings of the kind one sees in journals and text books in the biological sciences. Several thousand of my painstakingly drawn marine animals - worms, wheel animalcules and other lower invertebrates, arthropods including crustaceans, copepods, fungi, protozoa and the rest were in print by the time I graduated. I was so occupied with these extra curricular activities that I was hard pressed to find the time to study. A single detailed drawing, three inches square, could take half a day.
But I'll get to the point: Am I a cartographer because I drew beautiful maps in five colours, once, long ago? Am I an 'artist' or 'draughtsman' because I was once able to produce saleable pictures of biological specimens? Am I a 'photographer' because the same publisher commissioned me to take all the pictures of flowering plants for a series of books. All done on 35 mm with Plus-X by the way. Plus-X was the only film I used - for almost everything. I tried them all and found it the easiest to manipulate by changing processing conditions. I could get high contrast for publication and less contrasty negatives for portraits by changing exposure time and time and concentration of the only B&W developer I used - Rodinal. I rated Plus-X at 360 for portraiture and 50 for reproduction. My contention is that I ~may~ have been an 'Artist', a 'Cartographer', a 'Photographer' a 'News Stringer ' or one of quite a number of things, at one time or another - but does this entitle me to call myself one of these for the rest of my life. Nope! Right now I think I ~may~ still be a photographer because I take pictures ~and~ an Author because I write - both for money and for fun. And, by the way, in my drawings where more than one object was depicted I followed no 'rules' of composition that I knew. I shoved them in any way they fit. Or so I believed until a few moments ago when I took out a volume entitled 'Animal Life in SA' and found that one of my drawings at least, 'Mating Earthworms', obeys the rule of thirds. Aaaaargh! I give up. Don Dr E D F Williams http://personal.inet.fi/cool/don.williams Author's Web Site and Photo Gallery Updated: March 30, 2002
