When you acquire a certain amount of this stuff, you don't buy a "camera" any more. You buy a camera body or a camera lens, but you don't necessarily buy them together ready to shoot. Most people buy a camera with a lens and for 35mm equipment, that lens is usually 55mm, often f 1.4 or f 1.8. Because they sell so many of them, you can afford to buy them at a reasonable price: an extremely good lens at a very good value. If I had to live with one lens only, I'd stay with a 55mm and move in a little closer when I needed to fill the frame and a little farther back when I needed more room. The quality of this stuff is amazing.

The wide angles, the telephotos, the fish eyes and all that are lenses you use for special purposes, but also to break the mold and get yourself out of a rut. That hadn't been the purpose of using it in Jack London Square, but that was the effect and shooting with it was a lot of fun.

I started shooting in the Fall of 1958 (seriously, anyway, shooting and developing my own film). The new Japanese cameras were gaining their first foothold, the Nikon and the Pentax giving Leica, the original 35mm that revolutionized photo journalism at magazines such as Life, for example, a go. (Leica is still sold and it still costs a bloody fortune and it's still pretty nice although I've not seen one in a while.)

There were a lot of 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 Rollei's around (for those who could afford them) and I had the chance to borrow and use one at school. Eventually I bought a Yashica Mat, a 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 inch (medium format) twin lens reflex like the Rollei for 99 dollars new (which was money then, but a third the price of a Rolleiflex) with never a thought of a 35 because I liked the negative size and the grain quality and wasn't thinking of things like portability or the speed at which I could shoot.

I don't know if I would have continued shooting pictures if I had gone with a 35 rather than a medium format, a box two or three times the size of a 35. Hard to say. The film wasn't as good then, you can shoot a picture using 35mm today that easily rivals the medium format of that period, but who knows?

If I had it to do over I would have bought a 35 and shot everything I could find in New York City that moved. (Or didn't move.) We lived in Yonkers near the rail commuter line and I could reach Grand Central Station with a 25 minute ride. New York City in the late 50's was one hell of a place for a high school kid with a camera. I didn't know it then and I couldn't "see", but what the hell, at 16 I was lucky to know anything and "see" was just a word that wasn't particularly difficult to spell.

Dangerous to say those days are done and there's nothing like it anymore. There's never anything like anything anymore. I'm not 16 so I'm not connected to whatever's happening in the club scene or the street scene or whatever scene, but that's no excuse. The San Francisco area is huge with half the colorful types in the world (the rest of them hang out in The Netherlands) and I could spend a life shooting here and never scratch the surface.

What started this ramble? The wide angle lens and seeing the world a little differently than I usually do. A subtle shift of perspective and suddenly the world ripples a bit with new shapes and faces. A simple adjustment, the looking glass glows and you step through.