Intro
This is a blog about my interest in photography. There are many dimensions to my life and I have plenty of passions. But this particular site isn’t about any of those. Except, of course, photography. If you’re interested in photography, then welcome… and enjoy…
I’ve always had an interest in the visual arts. If it could be seen, I wondered how to capture it for posterity. If it could be captured, I wondered how to make it look its best.
I also love gadgets.
During my high school years, this manifested as an intense fascination with photography. I really couldn’t afford a high-end camera at the time, so I used a cheap point and shoot I had inherited from a family friend. And that got me by.
But I hung out at the camera store in my local shopping mall a lot. While in there, I spent much of my time admiring the really sleek, expensive cameras with all the buttons and dials and shiny lenses, but I only ever bought photography magazines because that’s all I could afford.
In those periodicals, I read all the reviews and cut out the ads for the newest cameras and lenses and pinned them on my wall. Some of my friends had posters of Ferraris and Farrah in their rooms. I had clippings of Minolta and Olympus cameras. Although I never owned either of those brands back then, I was a big fan of both. Some of their camera bodies were so beautiful, I likened them to works of art.
A few years later, as a military historian in the Army, I was issued a Canon AE-1. I finally had an SLR! It wasn’t much and it wasn’t pretty (and it most certainly wasn’t the legendary AE-1 Program) but it was my battlefield camera and I loved it. I shot exclusively in black and white and was taught my way around a darkroom courtesy of the military. Those were good years.
After leaving the Army, my experience as a historian and documentarian led to civilian journalism, and journalism—combined with my eternal interest in the visual arts—led to the newly emerging phenomenon known as the Internet. Eventually I became a web designer. Not exactly sure how it happened. It was all rather a blur.
Somewhere along the way, I dropped the photography bug. I was getting my visual arts fix with web design and between a growing family and a successful career, I had plenty of other things to occupy my time. Besides, photography had been transitioning to digital and I wasn’t sure what to make of all that. Some of the happiest times I had spent were in the darkroom.
To make the proverbially long story short, I recently started reading some photography blogs and watching photography videos on YouTube. I wanted to learn what the state of the industry was. Out of curiosity, I checked the price of photo equipment on Craigslist and eBay. I was astounded by how cheaply used cameras were selling for. Some of them were the old film cameras I had lusted over in the mall store all those years ago. Even some earlier digital models could be found at more than affordable prices.
To illustrate how behind the times I was, I had to ask Google whether film was still even being manufactured. I was delighted to find out that not only was it still being made, but as of late, there’s been a huge resurgence in the popularity of film photography.
Eventually I ended up buying several of those film cameras I had so intensely desired back in the eighties. I also picked up some of the newer models that came out after I had dropped out of photography. Apparently, some of the greatest technological innovations in film photography were introduced right before film started to fade away at the turn of the millennium. Those later models were truly marvelous machines.
To my growing collection of film cameras, I have since added a few choice digital bodies… because, well, after all, I love gadgets!
The end result is that I’ve rediscovered my passion for documenting the rich, beautiful world that I can see through a lens. I now spend some of my free days picking out a camera (or two) from my collection, some lenses, and a couple of different film stocks to take out with me for a few blissful hours of shooting. It doesn’t matter where or what. Sometimes it’s in my neighborhood. Other times it’s a park or it may be some downtown district or another. There’s always something to capture on film (or digital sensor).
So this blog is about… all that. The cameras, the lenses, the film, the digital sensors, and, of course, the resulting photos.
But, most importantly, it’s all about the fun to be had…
