Kainz artist of the month

Having retired hobbies become important for Jerry Kainz, Unison Bank’ artist of the month for February.

His one constant hobby is the camera, which in the last 45 years has always been within his arm’s reach.

Many of Kainz’s photos are documentation of Jamestown Fire Department calls. Having documented fire scenes for 45 years, switching to the softer side of photography, attempting to create interesting visuals which capture the serious and intense nature of a fire scene is challenging.

There are two topics, one dedicated to the local firefighters, city and rural, the other set are from Good Neighbor Club vacation trips.

He could not display 2,500 pictures of Firefighting and Good Neighbor Club trips due to space.

During the High school years cameras became a fascination for Kainz. The 120 Kodak Box camera then the Polaroid Land Camera, had pictures that self- developed in less than 2 minutes.

Later years during a vacation in Washington DC and the Smithsonian Museums using a small Kodak 35MM Pony, the pictures were not very good. He decided it was time to go in debt and purchase a Minolta SRT-201 35mm manual camera.

His world of pictures then changed with a wide angle lens, telephoto lens, a Honeywell Sun-pack flash gun powerful enough to momentary blind a person and light a subject in total darkness 50 to 100 feet away.

Having used the Minolta seems like forever “40 years” then digital cameras appeared on scene. His first digital was a SONY DSC-85 hand-me-down from Chad, his son. Eight years later his present was a hand-me-down Panasonic Lumix “g1.”

Tags: diversions, arts