Photography – Passtime elvoles into Business
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I have been experimenting in photography for about 15 years now. It started as a hobby and a way to catalog my travels during the time I was stationed in Germany from 1997-99. I can’t remember where I found it, but I got my hands on a Minolta 35mm SLR. It still had auto focus and auto exposure settings but, as I’ve said before, I am one of those people that just has to figure everything out. So, I put the camera in the manual setting and started going through film – a lot of film.
In late 1999, I had the opportunity to be stationed at the Pentagon in Washington D.C. My supervisor was a camera junkie and had started as a military photo journalist before transitioning into civilian life as a multimedia expert working at the Pentagon. His influence on my career was greater than he will probably ever realize, and his love for photography successfully caught fire to an already budding spark of an interest in photography. On weekends, I would take to the D.C., Arlington and Georgetown streets with a friend who had bought an earlier Sony consumer digital camera. We would still put the camera in manual exposure mode, but the digital format allowed us to explore a lot of different settings without burning through a ton of film. It’s funny to think that the phone I carry around in my pocket has a much higher resolution camera built into it than that first digital camera I had access to. At the same time I was playing with that first digital camera, I was also midway through my Associates Degree at Northern Virginia Community College and took several classes that focused on traditional film shooting and processing. The time in the darkroom was invaluable and has certainly played heavily into how I approach my Photoshop work.
In 2003 I moved to Eugene, Oregon to complete my Bachelor degree at the University of Oregon and continued to shoot and take classes in photography when I could get it to apply to my degree work in Multimedia Design. I was enamored with the Oregon country side and coast and it certainly intrigued me as a subject for further photo exploration. Since then I have continued to carry a camera with me almost everywhere I go and continue to pursue photography as a hobby.
As with most things, if you enjoy doing something you tend to be pretty good at it (or maybe it works the other way around, but that’s a question I may try to answer in another blog post). Over the last few years I’ve frequently shot weddings for family and friends and have put some of my favorite personal work in a couple of public shows around Durango. Also, since I started dating my wife in 2004, we’ve come to realize that she has a love of photography as well and we work very well together when called on to shoot a wedding. We now offer photography services for weddings and other group events.
I’ve accumulated thousands of images through the years. Images of traveling in Europe, walking the back streets of cities, bike trips and camping and hiking in Wilderness areas across the U.S. Though the role of photography in my life has evolved over the years, I continue to thoroughly enjoy my time behind the lens. I still break out one of the 35mm film cameras I own from time to time just to return to my roots. I’ve also now passed on my love of cameras and photography to my 4 year old daughter. She received her first camera last year for her 3rd birthday (so she would stop stealing my cameras) and has since taken hundreds of pictures on our weekly Sunday father/daughter walks around the Durango area. She still, frequently grabs one of our more expensive cameras and starts snapping off shots. It’s amazing what she sees and how hard she works to compose an image even at her young age. It looks like we’ll be shooting as a family for a long time to come.
Some early play at photography: