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ABOUT PICTURES
My home darkroom, 1975
Two things drew me into photography: my father’s 35mm slides and Life Magazine. My father was just a casual photo hobbyist, but he accumulated hundreds of slides from vacations and family events. I loved looking at them, even the ones from before I was born. Setting up the projector and screen, dimming the lights, was always a special activity. There was a sacramental quality to it. I loved the whine of the projector, the hot, dusty breeze from the fan, and the noisy clacking that announced every new image.
Life Magazine revealed the wider world of photography. As a kid, I knew my father’s snapshots and the glorious spreads in Life were fundamentally the same, but even a child could feel the artistic excellence pulsing in the latter. Life, and other magazines, let me see how powerful and absorbing photography could be; it began to tug at my psyche. Perhaps this was something I could do; but it would be a long time coming.
Though I got my first camera when I was about eight years old, I didn’t take the craft seriously until after high school. Now, as I consider this history, I realize my journey with photography has unfolded through four steps.
Photography
Awakens
Darkroom Days
In September 1973, I enrolled at Brookdale Community College, signed up for their Photo I class, and my world changed forever. Brookdale gave me a teacher, Herb Edwards, a fine artist whose passion for design and visual excellence informed every class. It gave me a professional darkroom with every necessary tool and technology. And it gave me a community, dozens of other students, all discovering this wonderful magic together. The darkroom days were heavenly days. I could easily pass six hours in that amber safelight glow, watching the chemistry materialize my vision on sheets of wet paper. There was nothing better. But by the end of 1975, it was over. I took a full-time job in a print shop, and for ten years photography fell by the wayside.
Ektachrome Years
After Brookdale, I still had a home darkroom; but my parents sold the house a year later, and my precious corner of the basement went with it. Besides darkness, a darkroom relies on wet chemistry, running water, dust-free air, and other factors that make it impossible in most locations. But there was an alternative: 35mm slides, usually shot with Kodak’s Ektachrome 200. Like my father, I found these compact, direct-positive images perfect for my situation. I still had a good 35mm camera and lenses, a decent tripod, and a camera bag. So, in 1985, I underwent a photographic Renaissance and rediscovered the joy of taking pictures. (Yes, other factors contributed to the ten-year hiatus, but they are beyond the scope of this narrative.)
Digital at Exit Zero
My first digital camera was a Nikon Coolpix 990, purchased in 2000. I loved this small point-and-shoot camera more than any I’ve ever owned. It had a swiveling lens for high or low angles, stunning macro capability, and more than enough resolution for the small computer screens of the time. I put this camera through its paces at Exit Zero; that’s Cape May, New Jersey, where my wife and I had been vacationing since ‘87. With a digital camera and laptop, vacations became a new sort of photographic safari. I reveled in the ability to shoot and share the photos on a TV that afternoon. It was photographic heaven, and I began flexing visual muscles I hadn’t used in almost 25 years. The immediacy of the digital experience gave photography a new glow, something very like wonder.
Smart Moves
It wasn’t until 2013 and my second smartphone that I realized a camera in your pocket virtually all the time could be great fun. My sense was, “Photography: it’s not just for vacation anymore.” Suddenly, any day, any location, could be a time for shooting. And anything could be a subject: a doorway at a client’s office, a splash of sunlight on a sidewalk, slivers of peeling paint. Interesting abstracts seemed to be everywhere. And not only did I discover the convenience of this new platform; it also helped me remember how much I enjoyed the process. I had acquired a robust DSLR a few years earlier, but that little phone was always handy, and with every passing month I used that camera more.
The next step was professional digital photography and post-processing, which happened roughly in 2023; that's where I am now. (I make no claims to being a professional; I just use the same tools.) To see what I’ve been doing lately, look under Photography. Mostly what I'm doing is simply trying to improve, to make sure I'm creating images that are worth looking at. So far so good.
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