Photo of my grandfather
In February I received a notice from Ebay that one of my obscure ‘watch word’ notifications that I had listed with them was sent to my email. The watch word was: ‘Francis Orville Libby, Photographer.’ Included in my email was a photo published in AP dated: January 26th, 1921. The photograph was a page cut out of the magazine and entitled ‘The Adventurer’ featuring a man in jodhpurs silhouetted against the sky standing alongside a mountain crag. It was for sale from someone in England for $20. As soon as I saw the image I exclaimed, to no one in particular; ‘That’s my grandfather!’ I bought the picture and waited for its delivery.
In the meantime, I found my grandparents’ scrapbook of their hiking expedition into the Presidential Mountains of New Hampshire, dated 1920. They were good friends and neighbours of Francis Libby and his wife and socialised with them often. The scrapbook was made up of 2½in photos taken by Libby and presented as a memento of their trip.
Francis Orville Libby was born in Portland, Maine, in 1881, graduated from Princeton University in 1904 with a degree in fine arts and joined Portland Camera Club in 1906. He was on the board of the Pictorial Society of America from 1930-35. He was selected as a judge of the 1922 London (England) Salon and became a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society that year. He died in 1961.
My grandfather, Dr Philip Pickering Thompson, was a major in the U.S. Army Medical Surgical Corp who served during World War I. Family lore has it that he suffered from PTSD. He had spent some time in Germany some ten years prior to this, where he learned to speak German so after the war he was assigned the position of Lord Mayor of Koblenz, Germany, as part of the occupation force. He returned to Maine in 1920 and set up in Portland where he practised for the remainder of his life. Frederic L Thompson
Some good detective work, Frederic. Our archive is a treasury of stories like this, waiting to be rediscovered.
Slide shows
I totally agree with Mike Dodman (AP 21 March) regarding having one’s photos on a slideshow. I have been doing this for many years on my computer and laptop.
My walls aren’t big enough to take all the photos I’d like to put on them. Having a slideshow running allows us to remember good photos, bad photos, places, people and incidents we’ve seen but would sometimes forget about if not reminded by the slideshow. We can be happy, sad, amazed, confused or just reminded of places we should return to for another holiday.
My mother was a pretty good photographer in her day (a keen member of the Lochaber Camera Club in Fort William, for many years) with not that much money to spend on photography, and would be amazed at what she would be able to achieve now with the technology. I therefore have some digitised copies of her photos in the slideshow too, to keep them alive.
Generally speaking, most of the time I do exactly the same with my music. With quite a large collection I play it on random shuffle, as it is too easy to forget songs I used to love.
Adrian Price William Klein
Your recent feature on William Klein, by David Campany (AP 28 March) reminded me of the work of an early influence on my photography, the wonderful Colin Osman, the founder and editor of the seminal photographic magazine Creative Camera. It was so incisive, just like Creative Camera used to be. Thank you, as ever. David R Morgan
X factor
Thank you so much for your excellent travel issue (14 March). You included advice on a wide range of topics, including several Fujifilm hardware options. However, when I think of my kind of travel to the Mediterranean coast and European cities, I like to explore with as little to carry as possible, and this is when my Fujifilm X100F comes into its own.
The little gem hangs neatly over a shoulder and has an excellent Fujinon f/2 35mm equivalent lens and digital teleconverter to cover normal to moderate telephoto situations. Then you have the brilliant hybrid viewfinder to switch instantly from a mirrorless mode, assessing bokeh and depth of field, to an optical mode with a brightline frame that shows what is, and is not, included in the picture at the various tele settings. If more focal length range is needed, there are a couple of neat little accessory optical conversion lenses that fit easily into jacket pockets for wider-angle or longer tele shots, and are also supported by the hybrid viewfinder. All this is packaged into a lovely retro body that does not detract from beautiful surroundings while other visitors are present or cause any offence. Recently in a Provençal market town a French gentleman complemented me on my ‘very old camera’. I attach a photo of my own X100F, with the accessory wide and tele conversion lenses.
Adrian Johnson
Well done, Billingham
It was lovely to see the founders of Billingham being recognised in your recent awards issue. I’ve been using Billingham bags since 1986, and they have accompanied me on my travels around much of the world, including a memorable road trip across Africa and several months living in the Peruvian Amazon.
They have kept my cameras and travel documents safe and dry, and I still have them to this day, though I don’t tend to carry so much kit around with me these days. It is lovely to hear that – in this day and age of greedy, faceless, multi-national corporations – there is still room for small family-run businesses like Billingham to thrive by ploughing their own furrow.
Michael Shawcross AI concerns
I’ve been reading with increasing alarm (including in AP) about AI-generated ‘photography’, which seems to have come out of nowhere. The ability to describe what you want in a picture in a few words and get a realistic ‘photo’ back in seconds will devastate the world of commercial photography, but some of these creations (like the recent picture of the Pope in a puffer jacket) are so realistic that I have genuine concerns for the future of truth itself. Photography has always been open to manipulation for the purposes of deception but AI takes this to another level. This technology is still in its infancy so who knows where it may lead. Benjamin Holmwood