Our Community of Photographers (and the best cameras)

Our Head in the Clouds Amherst community is made up of people here in the Valley – and, increasingly, around the world – who come together on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and our annual wall calendar to share our love of the sky and clouds, nature and weather, and all those places, locally and more distant, that take our breath away. Many of us are photographers (amateur and professional alike). Indeed, photos have always been a central part of the "head in the clouds" experience.

From wedding fashion photo shoots on a frozen Puffer’s Pond, to clouds reflected in March potholes on Pine Street, to every kind of weather calamity, we’ve watched the seasons, and we’ve watched the people (and very often their pets) who love those seasons.

Our annual wall calendar made its first appearance in 2014. This is our seventh year of featuring photographs taken by people who live in and visit our little corner of the world. 

It would have been all but impossible to pull off our calendar even twenty years ago. There’s some debate about which company produced the first fully digital camera, but consensus places it sometime in the late 1980s with a price tag of $1,500 and up. And those early digital cameras were cumbersome, with poor image quality. Of course, everyone had access to film cameras (point-and-shoot, 35mm, etc.), but professional photographers with the highest end cameras were the ones to watch.

Glass plate negative of a star field
in Sagittarius (photographed at the
Maria Mitchell Observatory on
Nantucket, Massachusetts)

I was introduced to serious photography in college, while majoring in astronomy in the late 1970s. Photographing the night sky for research is a highly technical process, often involving a camera mounted on a telescope, but I also photographed planets, star fields, variable stars and stellar spectra using research telescopes that projected high resolution images onto glass plates.

One of the perks of the work was unfettered access to the Science Center darkroom, where I learned to develop and print images from film negatives and glass plates. One day late in my senior year, I had a eureka moment – it occurred to me that I could apply my darkroom knowledge to, well, anything. And so, keenly aware that graduation would end my time in the darkroom, I went on a month-long spree with my early graduation gift (a Yashika Electro 35mm camera), took hundreds of pictures, and spent hours in the darkroom developing and printing photos of just about everything in sight. I was in a rare and privileged position. At essentially no cost (other than college tuition, of course!), I was able to take pictures with unlimited film, print contact sheets of my negatives, and create prints of any image I deemed even remotely interesting.

I never set foot in a darkroom after college, though my personal pre-graduation boot camp served me well when the high cost of film and developing forced me to be extremely selective about what I photographed. For much of the twentieth century, even once most people could afford some kind of camera, only professional photographers were in a position to take countless pictures, develop their own photographs, and land their work in a commercial publication (like a printed calendar).

The digital revolution of today has, at its core, democratized photography. At a reasonable price, anyone can take thousands of photos, crop and edit images, send their images far and wide, and, ultimately, hone their skills in the process.

After selecting this year’s calendar photos, our committee thought it might be interesting to explore what cameras our photographers had used and what settings they had selected (or had been auto-selected). I started by looking at my own photo’s metadata and was surprised (okay, slightly horrified) to realize I had taken the photo with a basic point-and-shoot camera. I have a higher end camera, after all – wouldn’t that camera better represent all my years of photography? Turns out, I wasn’t the only featured photographer who cringed just a little when they realized their photo wasn’t taken with their highest end camera. Which just goes to show that it’s not the camera that makes the picture but the photographer behind the lens. Indeed, among our featured photographers are four individuals who do this work professionally.

I will leave you to figure out who they might be (hint: you can’t necessarily tell by the camera they used). In the end, we learned that the adage about cameras really is true – the best camera is the one that’s with you.

Thank you for being part of this community – we can’t wait to experience the world through your eyes.