It was 180 years ago, details of the first photography system introduced, and the world gained the most influential art medium. Changing many times, with different process and techniques, the next large introduction to the art medium came just years ago.
Years Ago
Years ago, as a child, it was the film (35mm) SLR (single reflexive lenses) camera that my mother owned which got me interested in the art of being a photographer. As most in the late 70’s and early 80’s, we owned some type of “Disk” or 110 Instamatic cameras. No adjustment to the lenses, point and shoot, take to the drug store, grocery store, or photo hut to have developed. Type Camera. I would each with my allowance, run with my role and take it in for processing. To this date, I have those images, captured, framed, and blurred at times for all time keepsake.
As I grew, it was the 35mm that grabbed some of the most outstanding shots I have taken to date. It was this simple SLR that I learned the basic of light metering, focal length, and the law of thirds that today I have taken into my most stunning digital images.
Film of Yesterday
Swept away is the film of yesterday, today we shoot with nearly a billion new cameras a year. Some SLR, some modern-day Instamatics or push here dummy, many of us now use our phones. Cell phones have taken on qualities of some of my most expensive equipment, with greater focal and optical qualities than that of my most expensive digital Single Reflexive lenses camera. Costing me about the same as a small car at the time, my first DSLR was cutting edge to for the time. The salesperson, sold it on the truth that it would “ONE DAY” replace the film I had some come familiar with.
With my camera, a book, and new software, I headed home to install the software, to test out my camera, to see what just cost me a year’s wages. Learning quickly that the tools I was to work with, would destroy, manipulate, and craft images beyond my belief. Crafting the artistic and real artistic vision now show in my photography work. Realizing that my conventional photography could now be embraced, given depth, and shared more quickly with others. That my apprehension of digital technology was unfounded, we had taken the right step in photography, embraced and cherished the past to craft a new breed of photography. A breed with the strength to create the most influential, powerful art media the world has known.
Visual Story Telling
I share my visual storytelling now through my digital art, my tools not much different than before. Camera, lens, processing equipment, and publishing & Share. Sometimes my stories are true, powerful, and emotional. Others depict a version of reality that I want to convey, not exactly what was seen. As an artist, I am free behind my lens to interpret my world as I wish to see it. Stories that have come through images of my eye, mind, and heart.
Crafting an image of truth, in the visual representation, provides the suggestive balance between entertaining storytelling and genuine transparency. The captured image of our hearts, thoughts, and vision. Without the markup or staging of that image in our representation leads to the genuine discovery of the deepest views of our viewer’s soles, thoughts, and dreams which they see themselves in as they look over the real to life presentation of their most inner truths.
The Passon of Photography,
Photography, within it, is the passion which drives the creative spirit of my camera and lens work. The tools are only aids, Photoshop and Lightroom the chemicals and baths I once used to create the final image of my imagination. The truth, reality, although different than those that view them, are captured with the familiar and unedited realities that face my glass, eye, and sensor.
It is the passion of the view to be entertained by both image, and their own mind that keeps my passion for photography so alive, strong, and a desire to keep close the tools of my art, and fuel of my passion.