About

About TheCameraForum.com®

The camera and I have been in conversation since May 22, 1962, when I unwrapped a Kodak Brownie Starflash for my 12th birthday. Thank you again, Aunt Sis. And for the dozen rolls of Kodak Kodak Tri-X. A classic, high-speed, black-and-white film known for its versatility, classic grain, and wide exposure latitude, and ability to be processed in home darkrooms like the one my Dad had setup and used in the downstairs closet for his B&W film. The current Tri-X 400 speed is popular for a wide range of conditions, especially low light and fast-action photography, and is available in 35mm and 120 formats, among others. 

Sixty-two years later, that conversation continues. The tool in my hand keeps changing. The conversation doesn’t.

I launched TheCameraForum on August 7, 2012 – fifty years into my practice – the same year Kodak, the Big Yellow Father who made that first Brownie, filed for bankruptcy. The film world was dying. Mirrorless cameras were being born. Everything I’d spent half a century mastering was being rebuilt in real time. I felt compelled to document it, not as a journalist, but as someone living through it.

They say to really understand something some people have to write it down. I am one of those, I guess.

Over twelve years and 520 articles, this site became my way of thinking through photography’s transformation. Not reporting it – processing it. Writing to understand how we got from film to digital to mirrorless to hybrid storytelling, and now to AI. Documenting the voices of photographers – some now departed – who understood things being lost in the rush forward. Editing techniques of using a screen, mouse and some even a graphics tablet for still photography editing in Lightroom, Capture One and Photoshop instead of which of the 36 mounted chromes that came in that little plastic box to flip off the Lightbox into the trash.

WHO I AM

I’ve spent 60 years making silver gelatin prints in the darkroom. I had my own Wing Lynch processor at my home studio and did my own E6 and C41 processing – slides and color negatives – along with B&W. I had my own Cibachrome darkroom and processor. Twenty-five years printing pigment-based inkjet. Twenty-three years making platinum-palladium prints.

I didn’t just master printing. I controlled the entire workflow. Most photographers sent film to labs. I WAS the lab.

I’ve still got my Nikon CoolScan 8000 and the Cami Fluid 2¼ tray with the non-distortion anti-Newton ring glass for wet mounting. I learned it and kept the tools – at least the ones I can still get chemistry and paper for. Kodachrome slides and Cibachrome printing materials are both long gone now, and those were beautiful rich color prints for the right subjects. Technologies I mastered, then watched die.

I learned to see in Kodachrome, because that’s all the National Geographic photographers shot when I was growing up reading that subscription every month. Thanks again, Aunt Sis.

WHAT THIS SITE IS

This isn’t a community forum in the traditional sense. There’s no bustling platform, no comment threads filled with debate. It’s my documented journey through photography’s greatest transformations, written when the spirit of the camera moves me to record it.

Some photographers whose voices appear here are gone now. Their understanding of light, vintage glass, film discipline, and the practice of attention are preserved here because I watched them disappearing. I document endangered things – whether it’s a printing technique, a way of seeing, the wisdom of departed friends, or burros on a New Mexico roadside – because I feel them vanishing and believe they matter.

I write in waves. Sometimes daily posts. Sometimes silence for months. The camera and I have been in conversation for 62 years now. I’ve learned not to force it.

THE THREE CAMERAS

I’ve lived through three fundamental transformations of the camera itself:

Camera 1.0: Film (1839-2000s) – Light hits chemistry. But even this was construction. Film stocks had “looks.” Developers manipulated contrast. Darkroom work was subjective art. Ansel Adams spent days making his negatives match his vision.

Camera 2.0: Digital Sensor (1990s-2020s) – Light hits silicon. Algorithms interpret raw data. Every digital image runs through computational processing before you see it. The “raw” file isn’t raw – it’s already interpreted.

Camera 3.0: AI (2020s-?) – Language becomes light. Text prompts hit neural networks. Patterns emerge. Images manifest that never existed but draw from everything that ever did exist.

Same intent across all three: Make an image that serves my vision.

The tool changes. The work doesn’t.

WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW

After documenting the film-to-digital-to-mirrorless transformation (2012-2025), I’m now entering the next shift: photography to post-photography. Camera 3.0 I call it. Where the computer replaces the camera sensor and glass. Where the focused consciousness is partially my own, and partially non-human.

I’m experimenting with tightly directed and choreographed AI-generated images printed using platinum-palladium chemistry. Computational hallucinations materialized into physical artifacts that will last 1,000 years or more. Fake petroglyphs that will outlast real ones. Fictional portraits printed with precious metals.

This challenges everything about photography’s relationship to reality, presence, and truth. I’m documenting it here because I need to write it down to understand what it means.

WHO THIS IS FOR

If you’re here because you too witnessed photography’s transformations and want to understand what we lived through – or because you’re learning now and want to know how we got here – this archive preserves what matters.

If you share this sense that something important is always slipping away – a technique, a perspective, a moment of seeing – and you believe it’s worth documenting before it’s gone, then you’ll find something here.

This site is my 12-year (and ongoing) attempt to understand what photography is becoming by writing down what it was and what it’s turning into.

Welcome to my conversation with cameras. It started in 1962. It continues today.

Charles Paul Jones “Chuck”
Photographer, Filmmaker, Printmaker
62 years behind cameras | 23 years platinum-palladium | 300,000+ RAW images | Still learning
Publisher and Managing Editor
TheCameraForum.com®
Chimayo, New Mexico