When I was a kid I fell in love with photography. I had a little point & shoot camera that took 110 cartridges of black & white film, when I could talk my parents into buying me some now & then. I took pictures of everything--my neighbors, my toys, the plants in our backyard...nothing was safe from my lens. Even when I didn't have film I would still snap pretend pictures with my camera, composing the shot in my head. My love for photography grew by leaps and bounds when my 10th grade teacher Mr. Eilers taught us how to take photographs with a homemade pinhole camera. I was fascinated with how a picture could be recorded on a piece of photographic paper just by opening a hole in a box.
The next step was a Polaroid instant camera when I was a pre-teen. I remember the excitement of being able to see my pictures just mere seconds after I took them, watching them come to life in front of my eyes. I still have a scrapbook filled with pictures of my parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends and sister. Even my hamster was a star.
The high point came when my father's old manual Mamiya Sekor SLR camera was passed down to me from my older sister. I took photography during all three years of high school, learning to develop my own film and print my own photos. This is where I learned about apertures, F-stops and composition. I spent hours every week in the dark room and loved the smell of the development chemicals. I still remember how thrilling it was to watch my photos slowly develop, shimmering in the chemical bath.
Even though I never continued my education formally past high school, I never lost my love for photography and kept snapping pictures through all of the stages of my life. Now more recently I've decided to get back to the basics of what I love about photography and hope to learn even more about the new digital era. I'm hoping to maybe even eventually take it far enough to start my own photography business.
So begins my journey...
