Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

THE ADVENT of digital photography some ten years ago had ushered in a new sense of immediacy to image-making. Like television news in its heydays in the 60s and 70s, digital photography has helped more photographers – amateurs and professionals alike –- to embrace photography with a renewed enthusiasm. Digital photography has excised the last remaining obstacle to instant gratification. You take the picture, and in a fraction of a second, you have a picture, a digital image. That immediacy is a boon to photojournalists because it enables them to see the result of the picture-taking process milliseconds after they click the shutter.

But this newfangled technology has not always sat well with traditional film photographers. Many such traditionalists would rather go the circuitous route when creating images in their film cameras. Because such photographers believe that inspired image-making is the product of a ponderous, methodical, and pre-planned exercise. Revered photographers of the old days, like Ansel Adams, take hours to make a single image with their large, heavy film cameras. In today’s digital world, photography has been reduced to an almost mechanical process because of the conveniences that digital photography offers. Previsualization is almost completely a thing of the past.

But there are photographers who are holding on to time-honored principles of traditional photography, like amateur photographer and college professor Enrique "Ike" De la Cruz, who began taking personal photographs after he purchased his first single lens reflex (SLR) camera in Japan en route to the United States in 1968. That camera is a Nikon, not the battleship model, Nikon F, but the less expensive Nikkormat FS. The camera did not have an on-board exposure meter. Better to learn photography at its most basic level.

"I’ve always been interested in art and in general photography," Ike tells me after a sumptuous Filipino dinner at his home in Los Angeles. Ike has always been interested in taking pictures, and he had been recording images of his family, their travels in the United States and abroad, and his friends with his faithful Nikkormat FS. At one point, Ike even constructed a darkroom in his first house so that he could process black-and-white film and print them himself. "I began taking pictures in black-and-white, and I have been using the Nikkormat since I bought it; it’s been pretty random and casual," is how Ike describes his early photography. "I guess, through the years, I took a lot of photographs, and I also looked at a lot of photographs, and your eyes begin to get develop," Ike says.