One of my favorite quotes from the movie Sabrina: “I think I’ve been taking pictures all my life – long before I ever had a camera.” I bought my first camera when I was nine years old. It was a 110mm camera with built-in flash. I remember thinking it was magic that somehow a little canister inside the plastic body held images of places I had visited. Then, I would drop off the film at Wal-Mart for developing and within a week, I had glossy prints to hold in my hand preserving those experiences.
My mom received a 35 millimeter camera as a gift a few years later. Film was more expensive for this type of camera, so I was only allowed to take a picture or two with it. It felt foreign in my hands because it was a heavier square object instead of the 110 rectangle. It was an automatic and I remember being fascinated by the buttons. It also had an automatic winder, which turned out not be a great thing as it was quite noisy as it wound the film back into the canister. A point proven by my mother when she was a guest at a wedding and neglected to keep track of how many photos she had taken. When she reached the end of the roll, everyone including the bride and groom knew it because the whirring sound echoed in the quiet sanctuary. Thus ended my mom’s interest in photography and I inherited a slightly used 35mm camera.
I bought my first digital camera from Ebay. It definitely was not anything fancy. I think it had about 3mb of internal memory with no ability to add additional memory cards. The settings allowed the user to choose different size resolutions, as well as to take a short video if desired. I didn’t know anything about resolution, but I quickly learned that the higher the number resolution meant that I could take about seven photos. If I used the video function, I could record about 20 seconds of video before it would run out of space. I loved that camera though. I finally had a device I could use to take photos that I could then immediately download on my computer and review. No more waiting days to complete a roll and then days for it to be developed. Within a year, I upgraded it to one that had more memory and had a few more functions. It was still basically a point-and-shoot camera, but it gave me the ability to take more photos and critique what was working and what was not.
My sister came home from college a few years later with her new Pentax SLR camera. I was mesmerized by its weight and the sound it made when the shutter clicked. She explained a little bit about the mirror in an SLR and how it differed from the cameras I had used. She talked about shutter speed and aperture and controlling the light. Control the light? I was enthralled by the magic of it all.
I saved up my money and luckily, found a display model of a digital Canon Rebel G SLR camera at a local store. It only came with one lens – a 35 – 75mm. I bought it and immediately took it home to play. I loved this camera. In fact, 15 years later, it’s still the camera I use for most of my professional photography. I’ve bought additional lenses, filters, and other accessories, but the body is the same one.
The next step was to learn how to use the camera’s manual functions. I decided to take a photography course online with The New York Institute of Photography. The course is quite different now because almost everything has gone digital; however, when I took it, there were still courses on setting up a dark room and developing your own film (both of which I think are still important to know, by the way, even if you are a digital photographer). The other classes were about understanding how a camera worked, how to develop the photographer’s eye, and the different types of photography – portrait, macro, landscape, still life, photojournalism, etc. The next question to examine was, what did I want to photograph?
I love nature. I love being quiet among the trees, earth, and sky, pondering life’s big questions. Even better is when I have my camera in my hand. I look through the lens and it feels as though the answers are starting to unfold. It’s one of the few times that I feel my intuition the strongest. Look this way, one step that way, lower the angle, change the light, perfect. Take the shot. It’s not always perfect, but in that moment, it feels perfect, to me at least. One of the great things about digital photography, is that you can take as many photos as you want. I have additional memory cards and I can keep shooting until I think I’ve got it. I will admit that sometimes more isn’t always better though. There is something to be said about being limited by the number of images like I was when I had a film camera. When each shot costs money, you learn to filter out which images you really want to remember and to be particular about how you want to capture it.
Nowadays, everyone has a cellphone which has a camera on it. In the beginning, I was completely against using the camera on a cellphone. The marketplace was suddenly inundated with images of every moment of everyone’s day, no matter how mundane or interesting. On the other hand, the cameras on cellphones now are incredible. I use mine all of the time and with the “pro” functions, it gives me almost the same high-quality functionality that I get with my SLR. The best part? It’s small, fits in my pocket, and I always have it with me for when the mood strikes. Some of my best photos from the last two years, I took with my phone.
Even though I’ve witnessed the partial evolution of the camera, I’m still amazed as to how far the technology has come. Whenever I see a medium format camera in an antique store or a museum, I think about Ansel Adams dragging his 4x5 view camera into the woods to take those incredible landscape shots. I wonder what he would think of a camera phone. The film was expensive and massive, so you only got one or two shots. You had to make it count, and he certainly was an expert at making it count.
My photography is a work in progress, kind of like me. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that not everything I create will resonate with anyone other than myself. I hope it does, but the truth is, even if it doesn’t, the work resonated with me and each image is a little part of myself. I tried the “professional” route by working in a couple of studios, but it wasn’t for me. My favorite is landscape and nature photos. I still do a few portrait bookings a year, but I do it my way – outdoors. It’s natural lighting, relaxed poses, and a feeling that this is an accurate representation of emotion for the people involved in that time and space. That’s the kind of photography I create. Real emotion, real places, and a genuine appreciation for the beauty that surrounds us everywhere we go.