Photography

 A Photographic Archive

Redshank in flight	Ravens
Study in B&W	smoke
bee-hind	Trying it on
Outside my kitchen window	St Magnus Cathedral From the rear!
Kirkwall The Lifeboat Station	Gorse
Gran	Tide's oot!
Autumn sun over Gairsay	Goldcrest at Springfield

Foreword

This archive contains a selection of photographs taken by John Vetterlein over a period of some fifty years.

John’s first camera was a Box Brownie given to him by an uncle way back in 1949. The camera was in need of repair which the new owner set about attending to himself.

John's father's photographic activities about this time had taken second place to other pursuits and so he loaned John his bellows camera (also 120 film format), a quite modest affair with a maximum aperture of f/6.3. About 1960, F C Vetterlein returned to photography in a big way. By then John had left the family home and was beginning to take photography more seriously himself acquiring a Zeiss Werra I 50 mm camera. He says: "The Werra was very basic without either range finder or exposure meter, but it had an excellent f/2.8 Tessar lens which, in my opinion, has never been excelled by any other lens."

John Vetterlein later equipped himself with a Pentax Super A single-lens reflex camera and started to build up a small collection of cameras and lenses including Olympus half-frame models. However, he only took photography seriously (his own words) after his father's death in 1983. Shortly after this he turned to Nikon, again preferring to work with basic equipment afforded by the classic FM2. He came to digital rather late but now has a range of cameras including the early Minolta "F" series, Sony, Panasonic and Nikon single-lens reflex "D" range of cameras, together with a selection of interchangeable lenses.

The images featured in this archive include samples taken with most of the cameras mentioned above.

F C Vetterlein, John's father, was a talented all-rounder with a penchant for photography. His range was enormous having produced a massive chronology of Essex Churches and two portfolios arising out of his visits to the islands of the St Kilda group.

John Vetterlein recognizes his debt to his father's practice: "My father was obsessive over his interests in horticulture and photography. He killed gardening for me, but the photographic germ certainly caught on. During his lifetime I avoided competing with my father, although in the case of astronomy and music I have to admit to taking over quite a bit!"

Richard Helmann

Spring Ast LIX

http://www.spanglefish.com/springastlix/index.asp?pageid=234479