The Love of Photography

My interest in photography started as a child when my father would bring his 35 mm film SLR camera on vacation. It was a Pentax something or other with a basic lens, and had a strap resembling something you’d find at a Native American market in the South West. As it turns out, I would end up using that same camera for a black and white film photography course in college. By taking that class I began to appreciate the process a photographer needs to go through make a good piece of work. Having only 24 potential shots in the camera, it forced me to be picky about composition, light, and pressing the shutter at just the right moment. And then I inevitably would take a roll to the darkroom on campus, expose my film and have to start all over again. Sounds great right? Once I figured out how to use the development chemicals, the time spent in the darkroom was some of the most fun I had in school.

Shooting with film was a lot of fun, and good learning experience. But did it make me a good photographer? Sort of... It gave me a great foundation that I was able to use while shooting tens of thousands of photos on my cell phone. There are plenty of “real photographers” out there using “real cameras” that will announce to the world that camera phones have ruined photography for everyone. The fact of the matter of is I gained an immense amount of skill by shooting with a cell phone for so long. The ability to take hundreds of photos a day, and have the instant feedback in my hands allowed me to make better composition choices. I occasionally look back at the old cell phone photos, and some of them are still my favorite images.