I’ve always liked taking pictures.
When I was a kid, I would enter ten photos every summer to be judged in our local 4-H fair. I never won a big prize or advanced to the State Fair, but I enjoyed it and kept going. Looking back now, I think my photos and their grades are pretty telling of how I have approached photography over the years.
When I was a kid, I think I believed that photos needed to be of something impressive, that the goal of a photo was to communicate that I, the photographer, had been somewhere or done something interesting. The photo was more or less “look where I have been.”
Wow! Look! I caught a train coming through at Big Thunder Mountain Railroad! (Walt Disney World)
I remember being impressed with myself for taking a photo at a Cincinnati Reds game, catching the ball in mid-flight as it raced from the pitcher toward home. The shot itself was wide, as it was taken from the stands and we didn’t have a particularly large lens with which to zoom, and the colors were only tinted by the film we used (probably the cheapest cache on the wall in Wal-Mart). This, to me, was peak photography - I had been somewhere fun and had caught an impressive sight with the camera.
In college, this would shift slightly.
In 2009, I met a girl I would marry eight years later, and she got me into this band called The Wonder Years. In 2011, they would release a single called Local Man Ruins Everything in advance of the album Suburbia, I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing. The album would be a love letter of sorts to smaller residences in the Midwest; while the lyrics paint a very clear picture of the Philadelphia suburbs, small towns in the Midwest have similar vibes and it was easy to apply the narrative to a little place in Indiana. The record would be promoted with pictures and videos shot in South Philly, in areas highlighting its mundaneness.
This perspective caught my attention - here was photography focused on the anthesis of what I believed made a good photo, and it could be done in my backyard! When Instagram arrived the same year, my eye completely changed. Now, I was looking for mundane magic - moments that were so normal to me that, in retrospect, revealed a certain beauty.
My first image on Instagram in 2011
Over the years, I would waffle between shooting subjects fairly clinically, showcasing only the subject itself with no supporting elements, to delving back into this interest in artistic interpretations of the mundane, composing an image of the everyday to capture its beauty.
I suppose this fanciful flight between interests was best captured on my Tumblr, where I would scour the tags across the platform compiling images that suited my mood in the moment.
The biggest obstacle in my journey towards better photos is, looking back, perhaps unintuitive; I spent so much time at Disney Parks, where so much is perfectly photogenic and colorful on its own. I never needed to think “outside the box” to capture a moment, instead being able to capture picture perfect subject at anytime. (See BTMRR above as an example.)
Still, there was always an itch to improve, to capture moments, to improve my compositional eye.
While not a perfect photo, I return to this often because of the moment - the feeling and sight of seeing so many birds fly perfectly overhead.
Recently, I’ve tried to begin learning how to break out of my normal mode of taking & editing photos, thanks to some guidance from “Photography YouTube.”There, creators share (for free!) tips that could easily be curated into a class, making ”studying” easy and fun.
Downloading Halide to shoot and editing using Darkroom per Stalman’s advice is where my journey truly started over the last year.
I really love James’s relaxed style of presentation, and this composition video (along with his more recent “Exposure Myth” video) has really helped me to start thinking differently about how I want to shoot intentionally.
An old photo from Joshua Tree I edited recently to try to incorporate some of the lessons I learned from the videos above
In the coming year, I hope to really turn photography into a hobby. I miss running around Disneyland, taking pictures of sights big and small that caught my eye. What’s to say I can’t do the same with the seemingly infinite charm found in the smallest pockets of New England?
Until then, keep learning. Go find your spark. 💀
If I had to choose a favorite picture I’d ever taken, it might be this one. Thanks to some new editing tricks, I now love it even more.