Listen: Rich Schreibstein, photographing the local landscape
Everyone with a cell phone thinks they are a photographer, says Rich Schreibstein. “A phone doesn’t make you a photographer anymore than it makes you an orator,” says Schreibstein. “What you are is a picture-taker.” Schreibstein, of Altamont, takes his photography seriously. He is president of the Schenectady Photographic Society, founded in 1931, which he says is the oldest continuous photography society in the nation. Schreibstein has won many of the society’s juried competitions and helps to organize its exhibits and workshops, which draw both professional and amateur photographers from throughout the Capital Region. Schreibstein took his first photograph — of Mount Fuji as a 6-year-old in 1954 with a Brownie box camera when his father was stationed in Japan after the Korean War. A teacher at Shreibstein’s El Paso high school changed his life when she introduced him to a darkroom. Today, as Schreibstein explains in this week’s podcast, he uses those same darkroom techniques to create the effects he wants in his digital photographs. Enterprise readers will be able to see his photographs as they listen to Schreibstein’s descriptions.