My Personal History of Photography
So, here’s my story with regards to photography:
I’ve always enjoyed/appreciated pictures. I’m visual. I like to experience the world through my eyes. Very keen on that. The thought of going blind is terrifying. Visual is my primary way of interacting
with the world.
Up until a couple years ago, I really never took photographs. My mother had (still has, actually) a Pentax K1000. I had used it a handful of times. But that was more than 15 years ago. Time passed. Then, I got a digital camera, a fuji finepix 2 megapixel, back around 2002 to take pictures of my ironwork. My wife, Melissa used the camera much more than I did. She takes beautiful pictures. Go see them! Several years passed. One christmas, I got a good bonus at work, and got her a Nikon D70. I bought a Nikon coolpix 5400 for myself.
I grew jealous of the attention and of the stunning beauty of her work, so I thought to myself, “Self, you can take pictures. Why not try?” So I started. And I sucked. I sucked for a long time. Probably until the day that a good friend told me, “Hey, those party pictures you took sucked. No more party pix.”
I was hurt. I thought, “wow. I need to improve. I don’t want to make crap photographs.” So I made an effort to Not Suck. It took a lot of pictures. Then I took a lot more. And then a lot more.
I bought a manual camera, a Pentax K1000 (which is made of awesome), and shoot a lot of pictures there. I purchased a film scanner (see my review) to digitize my shots. I learned how to compose. I learned how the technical quality of a photograph is measured, to understand f/stops, exposure, and the correlations between them. I learned to develop B&W film myself. I’ve experimented with doing my own printing. I strongly believe that shooting with a camera where you have to do everything manually is essential to developing a technical base.
But basically, I put forth a lot of hard work to improve my skills. A great book, if you haven’t seen it, is “Photography” by London and Upton. I found it immensely helpful.
And then my photographs became acceptable to me. I grew to be critical of the shots I made; to judge them more harshly; to not tolerate a bad picture (whatever that means? *grin*)
But still, much improvement was to be had. So I read. And I found strobist. Lighting up until then is something that I didn’t do. I knew I didn’t like on-camera flash. So I had worked with ambient light.
Which I do like. But then I saw what else could be done. How light could be controlled and moved and shaped to make a new, interesting pictures. So now I’m working on learning about light.
I’ve made progress doing what I enjoy. I can now make a photograph of someone that they enjoy. That others enjoy. That I enjoy. I’m happy about that.
I’ve got a long way to go still. There you have it.
