As I became more adept at photography I moved from a 35mm Olympus camera to a Rolleiflex twin lens camera. You know, the kind you picture Richard Alvedon shooting with in the studio. If you don’t know who Richard Alvedon is, shame on you. The Rolleiflex had it’s limitation and the more advanced you got with your camera desires the more expensive they became. I used Rolleiflex for years and then switched to a Rolleflex SL66, another square format camera and eventually I used a Hasselblad (which I still have – wish I still had one of the Rolleiflex cameras). Oh, and don’t let me forget the Mamiya 6MF that was the best camera. I carried it and shot with it everywhere but eventually the rewind mechanism failed again and again. That was it’s Achilles Heel. Eventually it became impossible to get parts as the years went by.

What I am getting at is the fact that with digital cameras you don’t see people shooting in the square format. I unintentionally dropped shooting square once I moved to digital. Even the digital medium format cameras don’t allow for square shooting. With some digital cameras you could use the 1:1 crop factor but you had to shoot in jpeg. Recently I realized that my Fuji cameras (X100F and the X E-3) allow you to use the square format and still get the full RAW file – neat. Maybe this is not new but I am just finding out now. I should have read the manuals more carefully.

It seems then that I want to do a series of square images and since I have been in a rather existentialist mood lately (hopefully not depression) I decided to shoot square images of my “now”. After all isn’t that what photography is? Photographs are little slices of now carried downstream to a future “now”, actually to many future “now(s)”. So the title is, Now². Simple and straightforward, no gimmicks, no grand ideas or messages. This will become a future issue of FOS I hope.