About Me and My Photography
I took my first pictures on a family vacation in 1973 using my father’s Kodak Retina 1a.
Back then you used film. It was expensive. You only had a limited number of
exposures. And you didn’t get to see the results of your work sometimes until weeks
afterwards. You didn’t have a lot of options back then. The film you chose dictated the
ASA you could use, so the best you could do was to adjust the aperture and shutter
speed accordingly to get a correct exposure. Because of these constraints I learned to
compose my pictures in the viewfinder and limit my shots to pictures I thought would
turn out as good prints. Those limitations left me wanting more options and
possibilities.
So I built my first darkroom a couple
of years later and learned to
develop my own film and print my own pictures. Finally I could experiment
with composition and subject matter and have control over the final print. I
took lots of pictures and learned about exposure and lighting, and the
limitations of a single lens camera. So I moved up to SLRs. And learned the
intricacies of focal lengths, depth of field, and flash photography. I put a lot of
miles on those cameras and and spent a lot of time in the darkroom. I filled
up books of negative holders and boxes of prints. How things have changed
since then.
Digital photography came on to the scene and many of those old limitations came back
with it. The one advantage of digital was instant review of your image and the ability to
use that to hone your results in real time, although that hardly compensated for the
lack of quality and creative range. I shot mostly quick and dirty product pictures for the
Internet. Not very appealing or satisfying.
Digital image capture has come long way since then. Today’s professional Digital
Single Lens Reflex Cameras (DSLRs) are fantastically complex and powerful tools
offering nearly unlimited possibilities in exposure compensation. You can now move
from landscapes to studio portraits to night time action with the push of a few buttons,
so long as you know how those buttons will effect your photograph. That flexibility is a
great benefit and has expanded the
photographs range into areas that were once the realm of highly specialized
equipment and expertise.
Along with Digital Photography came the advent of Post-Processing
software, color management and computer “work flow”. Processing images
has become as complicated as taking them and given near limitless abilities
to alter and enhance your photos.
Knowing that you can alter nearly every aspect of your exposure and image
gives you near limitless opportunities to indulge in the creative art that is
photography. The expanded horizon that digital imaging has afforded me is a
dream come true.
Now I have more options than ever and the gear I carry around everyday
reflects just how far the world of photography has changed.
Through all this I still say: “The best photo I ever took? The next one.”
About Me
Eyes on the World
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