David Kachel Photographer

In 1975, at age twenty-five I graduated from Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa ...

Andenes (film = PCF: ZS Expansion Film)

... not a background you would associate with ending up as a photographer, unless you count hundreds of hours of training in X-ray as a foundation for photography. I don't.

(My only early connection with photography was the knowledge that my father had worked his way through college as a photographer and that he built me a darkroom in our basement when I was twelve. A typical twelve-year-old, I was unimpressed by the former and ungrateful for the latter. Still, something must have stuck.)

After a couple of years in private practice I realized it wasn't for me. I got tired of punching down the high spots (a tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating term chiropractors sometimes use to describe the nature of their day-to-day work, much like a dentist might refer to his work as filling potholes). So I signed on to teach at the brand new International College of Chiropractic in Melbourne Australia where I made a fateful mistake:

The ICC was barely a year old and none of the courses I was assigned to teach had been taught there before. My first duty for each new course was therefore a mad scramble to amass materials. One of the classes I had been assigned was dermatology. It didn't take long before I realized I would not be doing a particularly effective job of teaching dermatology without a lot of visual aids. After all, a nasty skin disease requires more than just a verbal description for it to stick in the mind. A really disgusting photograph makes a far more lasting impact. So I bought a 35mm camera and a lot of slide film. That was part A of my mistake. (Some months later I was delighted to learn from my class that a number of students from the local medical school were skipping their own school's dermatology classes to sneak into mine. It's nice to have your ego inflated from time to time. Or perhaps I just had a more palatable variety of repugnant photographs.)

Part B was to buy a book of Edward Weston's photographs. That was my real downfall. My father had never shown me the heights to which photography could aspire. Or perhaps he had, and I wasn't paying attention. I left ICC after only a year and began a severe economic downturn, otherwise known as a career in fine art photography. I didn't intend to abandon my first career. I simply could no longer focus my attention on it.

After leaving Australia I spent a few years in Peru where I learned the language, returned to private practice for a brief period (I was the first chiropractor in Peru; now they are overrun with them), learned that private practice is a LOT more challenging in a third world country, made some photographs and did quite a bit of research and development of new photographic techniques. In fact I made somewhat of a name for myself in this area and was for a time, a contributing editor to Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques magazine. (Technically this magazine still exists under another name, but it is a feeble shadow of its former self.) Though my articles on photography have been published over seventy times in a number of magazines around the world (occasionally with someone else's name on them), all of my articles that one might refer to as groundbreaking I faithfully published first in D&CCT.

You will find many of the more important of those articles listed at right. As I come across others I will add them. Just click on any title and a new window will open containing the article on a web page that is more easily printed. These new techniques were all developed for conventional analog photography and therefore don't apply as well to digital photography. That is to say that in some cases the materials used no longer exist or the technique makes no sense in light of current digital tools. However, the underlying concepts are still valid and much of the knowledge is still useful and perhaps even cutting edge. This is particularly true when it comes to the Zone System which is either directly or indirectly, the subject matter of most of the articles.

At any rate, there they are. No promises, warranty or other guarantees are made. Use the techniques/information at your own risk. If you blow yourself or the world up , I am not responsible. I also will not provide any support of any kind for these techniques. I plan to do no more research and development of any kind, having decided to devote all of my time to making new photographs and writing an occasional monograph.

These are not all the articles and there are some typos and other erros that have crept in over the years mostly by way of transferring text and illustrations from one medium to another. I will attempt to clean them up as time permits but my efforts are of course, concentrated elsewhere.

David Kachel