Photography by Daniel John Allen
Title.
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1970, I am the son of Artist Robert Allen. It is my father's influence which has given me my eye for a great photograph. Going out with his art case and an easel to paint or draw farm scenes on the weekends when I was just a child.....dad coming into St. Mary's School to teach special art classes from grades 3 to 8 on his days off.....taking me with him to galleries and workshops and art shows....he passed on his passion for art to me and a lot of other people and continues to do so by showing his work at art shows across Ontario every summer.
In 1975, at the age of 5, I received my first camera as a gift from Doris Boyd, an art gallery owner from Bay Ridges, who was a good friend of my father and who always had some of my dad's work on display. It was a Kodak Brownie 620 of the mid to late sixties era. It was a gift that would forever change my life....and I'm sure that my dad spent a shitload of money on film and developing for me at the time!
In 1977 we moved from Pickering, Ontario to an old farmhouse about a mile from the Hamlet of Trent River in the Kawartha Lakes region. It was there that my dad set up a makeshift darkroom in the cellar and we would spend hours and hours down there developing his photos. When I was in grade 7, my dad and I built a pinhole camera out of an old Bandaid box and some tin foil. We experimented with it and took some amazing photos with it that we developed in the cellar. The pinhole camera became my science fair project that year.
It was also during that time that my dad gave me my first SLR camera....a Minolta 110 SLR. It was with that camera that I really learned the basics of photography....that and spending hours and hours playing with my dad's Minolta XD-11 without any film in it, studying the mechanisms and the relationships between aperture, shutter speed and focal length.
Around 1987, my father gave me my second SLR, a Minolta XE-7 35mm SLR, which I still have and occasionally use to this day. This camera is truly an artist's tool, but it wasn't until I returned to college in 1993 that I fully realized both the camera's and my own abilities. At Sir Sandford Fleming College in Lindsay I had complete and unrestricted access to the school's darkroom facilities and I took full advantage of that privilege, even skipping entire days of classes to be in the darkrooms. In 1994, I started a photography club that was sponsored by the student government and a local photo shop who sold us our film and paper at a discounted rate. It was there that I truly began to experiment with photography and produced what I still consider to be some of my best works. It was also in college where I began my camera collection.
It began with a 1950's era Kodak Brownie 620 box camera with a flash unit that I bought for CDN$7 at a pawn shop in downtown Lindsay, Ontario. From there, people heard that I had started collecting cameras and I was inundated with old cameras that people dug out of their closets to give me for my collection. I currently have about 35 cameras of all sizes and shapes from a Minnox 16mm micro-film spy camera to a huge 1960's era Polaroid Land Camera and some box cameras dating back to the early 1920's....all them marvels of technology of their day. It was also around that time that my dad gave me a collection of books about photography and the masters of the art. I still have them all today and I still study the images and read about the greats in the history of photography. My early black and white film images were heavily influenced by Ansel Adams who is a true master of light and black and white images.
The arrival of the digital age, actually the transition between film and digital, with all those shitty auto-focus 35mm SLR's marked a bit of a break from photography for me, other than your standard point and shoot stuff. Then 1998, I visited Brazil for the first time, and in 2001, I moved here...and that changed my life forever.
In 2005, I bought my first high quality digital camera from my good friend Krishna Muirhead, a photographer from Portland Oregon...a Nikon Coolpix 5400. This is a brilliant camera which gave me the portability and discretion of a point and shoot with the creative control of a higher end camera. It was with that camera that I began documenting life in Brazil. I began wandering the streets and taking pictures of ordinary people doing ordinary things but the resulting images were extraordinary. I now have a Nikon D100 DSLR, which I also got from my good friend Krishna. I love that camera, even though it's old and it's slow...it's a marvellous instrument. I must thank my good friend Krishna Muirhead, another great photographer, for bringing me into the digital age of this great art.
And so I continue to wander the streets of Belo Horizonte, sometimes aimlessly, sometimes with a vision in my mind of what I want, but always with my camera in my hand.
In 1975, at the age of 5, I received my first camera as a gift from Doris Boyd, an art gallery owner from Bay Ridges, who was a good friend of my father and who always had some of my dad's work on display. It was a Kodak Brownie 620 of the mid to late sixties era. It was a gift that would forever change my life....and I'm sure that my dad spent a shitload of money on film and developing for me at the time!
In 1977 we moved from Pickering, Ontario to an old farmhouse about a mile from the Hamlet of Trent River in the Kawartha Lakes region. It was there that my dad set up a makeshift darkroom in the cellar and we would spend hours and hours down there developing his photos. When I was in grade 7, my dad and I built a pinhole camera out of an old Bandaid box and some tin foil. We experimented with it and took some amazing photos with it that we developed in the cellar. The pinhole camera became my science fair project that year.
It was also during that time that my dad gave me my first SLR camera....a Minolta 110 SLR. It was with that camera that I really learned the basics of photography....that and spending hours and hours playing with my dad's Minolta XD-11 without any film in it, studying the mechanisms and the relationships between aperture, shutter speed and focal length.
Around 1987, my father gave me my second SLR, a Minolta XE-7 35mm SLR, which I still have and occasionally use to this day. This camera is truly an artist's tool, but it wasn't until I returned to college in 1993 that I fully realized both the camera's and my own abilities. At Sir Sandford Fleming College in Lindsay I had complete and unrestricted access to the school's darkroom facilities and I took full advantage of that privilege, even skipping entire days of classes to be in the darkrooms. In 1994, I started a photography club that was sponsored by the student government and a local photo shop who sold us our film and paper at a discounted rate. It was there that I truly began to experiment with photography and produced what I still consider to be some of my best works. It was also in college where I began my camera collection.
It began with a 1950's era Kodak Brownie 620 box camera with a flash unit that I bought for CDN$7 at a pawn shop in downtown Lindsay, Ontario. From there, people heard that I had started collecting cameras and I was inundated with old cameras that people dug out of their closets to give me for my collection. I currently have about 35 cameras of all sizes and shapes from a Minnox 16mm micro-film spy camera to a huge 1960's era Polaroid Land Camera and some box cameras dating back to the early 1920's....all them marvels of technology of their day. It was also around that time that my dad gave me a collection of books about photography and the masters of the art. I still have them all today and I still study the images and read about the greats in the history of photography. My early black and white film images were heavily influenced by Ansel Adams who is a true master of light and black and white images.
The arrival of the digital age, actually the transition between film and digital, with all those shitty auto-focus 35mm SLR's marked a bit of a break from photography for me, other than your standard point and shoot stuff. Then 1998, I visited Brazil for the first time, and in 2001, I moved here...and that changed my life forever.
In 2005, I bought my first high quality digital camera from my good friend Krishna Muirhead, a photographer from Portland Oregon...a Nikon Coolpix 5400. This is a brilliant camera which gave me the portability and discretion of a point and shoot with the creative control of a higher end camera. It was with that camera that I began documenting life in Brazil. I began wandering the streets and taking pictures of ordinary people doing ordinary things but the resulting images were extraordinary. I now have a Nikon D100 DSLR, which I also got from my good friend Krishna. I love that camera, even though it's old and it's slow...it's a marvellous instrument. I must thank my good friend Krishna Muirhead, another great photographer, for bringing me into the digital age of this great art.
And so I continue to wander the streets of Belo Horizonte, sometimes aimlessly, sometimes with a vision in my mind of what I want, but always with my camera in my hand.
