Photography and Me

 Photography has always fascinated me. My parents bought me a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye box camera when I was 8. The link will show you what it looked like and also its performance parameters, which were limited, to say the least. I remember using it indoors at the Smithsonian shortly after I got it. Thankfully, my horrible shots are now safely at the bottom of some landfill in Berks County! But it sparked an interest in doing better.

My brother brought back a Konica 35 mm single lens reflex (SLR) camera when he returned from the Navy and gave it to me in high school. Now I could play with shutter and aperture settings and different film speeds. It was all trial and error but I slowly got better and in the days of film, I mostly shot color slides. I finally bought a Canon AE-1 after I joined the Navy. This was a very popular entry-level SLR at the time (Canon discontinued it in 1984) but it was solid and my photography improved a little bit more. Margan and I used it and her SLR (I think that was also a Canon) to make slides for medical lectures. Our house in Norfolk was burglarized in early 1990 and both cameras and their lenses vanished. 

My interest in photography went dormant during most of the 1990s. When we needed slides for lectures, we used the medical photography services of Naval Hospital Portsmouth. It was also the time that PowerPoint was becoming the standard to create presentations for lectures and we found that creating lecture materials was much easier than photographed typed slides. But PowerPoint did nothing to scratch the creative itch that cameras provided. But cameras had also evolved. 

We bought a Sony Mavica in 1999. It was a hoot. Images were JPEG, tiny, and were captured on floppy disks!  But they could be inserted into PowerPoint presentations and I did a roast of the Portsmouth Board of Directors using the Mavica and Powerpoint. It seemed necessary, though, to get a better camera. We purchased a Nikon Coolpix 4500 in 2003 in Chicago. But it was a point-and-shoot with many limitations. In 2005 we took the plunge back into the SLR pool with two Canon EOS 30Ds (two because both Margan and I wanted to enjoy photography). The circuit with the earlier SLR film cameras was now complete.

We read a lot about the technical and artistic aspects of photography. We did some online tutorials. But it became apparent that Malcolm Gladwell was onto something in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. You have to practice, practice, practice to do better. And so we did. We took our cameras everywhere and photographed much. Slowly the quality of our photos improved. We posted them online. The first site we posted to is now defunct; Stock Exchange was in Budapest (wow) and photos you posted were for everyone’s use. In other words, you relinquished the right of ownership. Here I learned an interesting lesson.

Have you seen this?

It’s all over the internet: sites like Imgflip allow you to create memes and this fellow is an example. This is a photo I took right before Halloween in 2005 at Johnson’s Nursery in Olney, Maryland because… because I thought it was cute. It was part of a larger outdoor display (note the hay bales on the right) and, in retrospect, technically it was mediocre. Others saw this free image as a moneymaker. I would love to know how much it has earned in its 17 years floating around the internet. Now all I can do is smile when I see it pop up online.

Margan and I graduated to better Canon digital SLRs (the 7D and the 5D Mark III) but we also found the neatest little camera in the Leica D-Lux series. We have owned the 3, 6, and now the D-Lux 7 which are light, powerful, and have taken the place of the heftier Canon SLRs when we travel and don’t want to lug around the heavy stuff. Here are links to some photos I have taken with the Canon 30D, the Canon 7D, the Canon 5D Mark III, the Leica D-Lux 3, the Leica D-Lux 6, and the Leica D-Lux 7. 

The photos are from my Flickr account. Flickr is the main site I post to now but I also post to others and make a little money from my work (emphasis on little): Redbubble and 500px. It is gratifying when someone wants to purchase my work but the real fun is making the photo (lighting, composition, all the artistic stuff) and doing the photo processing. Since photo processing is now mainly a digital exercise, it is both fun and somewhat addictive. Flickr, if you do not know, remains one of the most used photo sharing services on the web. It really is a giant repository and archive for photos with over 10 billion photos online. 

Last, the advent of cellphone cameras has been perhaps the ultimate gamechanger in photography. Cameras in Apple iPhones and phones using Google’s Android operating system now rival the more advanced cameras like my Canon 5D Mark III and Leica D-lux 7. And like many of my fellow humans, my phone is always with me. This photo of an owl was taken and processed totally on my Google Pixel 5. This is where I would advise people interested in photography to begin today. Yes, do snapshots – babies and other loved ones, travel shots, plates of scrumptious food. But take a little time learning composition and try a free photo processing app like Snapseed on your phone. I assure you that your photos can really become works of art. And the cost is minimal. Thanks for reading.