In 2004, I bought my first “real” camera. I saved up a few hundred dollars and walked in to a local camera shop ready and wide-eyed, prepared to be the best photographer the world had ever seen. Digital photography was still a new and cutting edge technology – it would be another year until the first 5D was released and a full three years before Nikon even had a full frame camera – I couldn’t afford it. I didn’t know what I was really getting into, either. The internet existed, yes, but there wasn’t the plethora of camera reviews and technical spec sites that there are today. We still shopped like we used to – in stores, with salespeople.
I remembered seeing the Nikon brand name on my step-father’s camera strap when we would go on family vacations growing up. He would take pictures of places like Carlsbad Caverns and the Grand Canyon and later put them on slides he would project on the wall to show family and friends (I can still hear the click-clack the machine would make when you advanced to the next slide). I couldn’t tell you what camera or lenses he used but the brand stuck in my head all the way up until I was ready to get my own. So, I started with a Nikon N80, 35mm film camera. It wasn’t the best, but it would do the job.
I spent the next year or so scavenging garage sales for old lenses, and taking as many photos as I could afford to (film was never cheap). Progress was slow but steady as I memorized apertures and shutter speeds so I could quickly make adjustments in my head. On weekends I would rent darkrooms at local camera stores and try to print anything worth hanging on a wall, to little avail.
It wasn’t until 2010 that I would get my first digital camera. The technology had finally caught up to film, both in quality and in price. I couldn’t believe the speed at which you could experiment and advance an idea through several iterations. Finally the process could get entirely out of the way of creating an image. I could see something and create it in the camera almost instantly.
Today, I spend much of my time creating images that capture the world and the people and things in it as I see them. I like the way shadows and light change what we see when we have the time to study it for longer than a passing moment. I’m still not the greatest photographer in the world, but I’ll settle for showing you the world, through my eyes.
