User:Canada Jack

About me en This user is a native English speaker.

I have a similar page on wikipedia, though I've started this page to handle my mostly vintage images of various personalities.

My photographic story

My name is Jeremy Gilbert, I hail from Toronto, and have always liked photography. My first camera was my mom's old Kodak box camera which took 620 film... migod, I just checked - I still have it! A Kodak Duaflex III camera. On-line it says the camera was made from 1954-57. Started taking photos with it in 1974, then later that year I was given a Pocket Instamatic camera which took microscopic 110 film. Finally, I inherited my grandfather's old Praktika camera in 1978. It was, I think, an LTL. It is with that camera that a good chunk of the photos I have contributed were taken.

Somewhere along the line, I got a 135 mm lens to augment the 50 mm lens I inherited. From 1978 to 1985, it was the only camera I used.

In 1985 I purchased a Nikon FE 2 at the old 47th Street Camera in New York City, and used it and a 35 mm lens for the next decade or so, then my interest in photography waned.

I got a digital camera in 2007, one of the little pocket things, and it's rekindled my interest in photography. For one, it is not the clunky thing hanging around my neck that the old SLRs were, and for another the digital technology allows me to take millions of photos and not worry about "wasting" images. It's a Canon A720IS, 8.0 mega pixels. I am not really tempted to get any of the fancier digital SLRs yet as I am getting an enormous amount of use out of this camera.

I got a scanner over the summer of 2008, and this has been an eye-opening exploration of a lot of my old photos. Many I had never printed, or had printed rather poorly. I was always impatient and lazy in the darkroom.

My contributions

For the moment, my chief contributions will be in the realm of vintage photographs which were taken by me.

I notice that a lot of wikipedia pages feature personalities who had their heyday in decades past, but are photographed recently and those photographs are inserted here. In some cases, I have images of personalities from the era they were at their peak, or at least not in the aging "reunion tour" phase of their careers (in the case of musicians). I am trying to update some pages with vintage images, though some of the newer images are often better or at least just as good (if more wrinkled...).

Of course, the free licensing of images here means I am giving away some of these images, and it is not my intent to advertise similar images for sale as I have no particular interest there (though I have some images licenced to Canadian Press). So, if you happen to be interested in what I have, feel free to ask, but I am not really set up for professional sales.

That being said, I strive to include decent photos, but I typically have more or better images.

I am not at the moment thinking about contributing photos I've taken lately, as most obvious candidates for inclusion that I might be expected to record (such as landmarks in Toronto) have already been well-covered by other photographers. However, I do have unusual access to some people of note and if and when it seems appropriate, I will take photos of them, or of other items of interest and/or relevance to the community here.