I like to, every year or so, go back and look at how I started getting into photography…the months where I thought putting ugly black borders with titles and copyrights on my photos were okay. The years I worked with a cheap 4.1 MP camera because I was falling in love with photography with no funding to really pursue it with equipment.
In a way, it’s a way to relive the memories. It’s stunning how much detail is encoded within the connection between the image and my memory. Looking at the photo just makes my synapses fire in all sorts of ways, unearthing feelings, frustrations and random unrelated but chronologically familiar events.
Anyway, here are a few I think I still maybe kind of like. At least, they’re not terrible for a kid with no talent, skill or education on the subject built yet.
I bet in another 7 years, I’ll be saying the same thing about my work now. I wonder what I’ll be producing when I’m 90, if I even live that long, with this kind of clarity in life. I wish to be on this journey forever.
I am a sexy fish? Man I was even bad at naming these photos.
..I actually CAUGHT this chipmunk by chasing it. So don’t tell me I couldn’t survive in the forest. :) I let him go after.
I keep coming back to this picture. There’s something about it that screamed my style long before I had developed it, before I’d unearthed it.
I remember taking the MARTA to and from university every day. The ride was long, and I didn’t have much to occupy me. In the fall months I’d be greeted with a sunset on the way home everyday. The summer months would see me home with sunshine, the winter months would see me home with suspicion and a minor paranoia as I walked to the station and to my car in the dark. It was an experience for those two years, for sure.
This starts my love obsession with water. It’s beautiful. By this time I’d bought another, more powerful point and shoot. A Sony 7.1MP H5. I used it for about 3 years and I worked the hell out of what should have been a casual vacation and birthday parties camera.
This is about when I started to look at light differently. I used to focus on the object and angle my shot to it but I soon started to manipulate the light sources. This was a candle through a glass of sweet tea. Again, the memory of J taking me to the student center version of a fancy valentines day date accompanies this. It was a good point in our relationship, a pivot right before a couple years of fairly drastic change in both of us.
I get my first dslr and I go crazy town with it now that I can REALLY macro. This is the point where I start falling in love with bokeh.
This picture was my crowning glory for a while. Why? Because it made Daily Deviation on Deviantart. This means out of thousands and thousands of submissions that day, mine was featured on the front page for 24 hours, selected as a part of a somewhat ‘elite’ gallery. Watching the comments roll in, alongside thousands of views and a few hundred favorites completely made my day. Actually it pretty much made my week. At this point I was looking for positive feedback from a community of people. Not the “omg that is sooo pretty you are sooo talented” kind. Those usually mean nothing. Even today, I can’t see it as meaningful to me. I mean the kind of feedback where there’s a tangible, measurable reaction from the community, a choice made, and a high 5 from people I considered my artistic superiors. That is easily the best feeling to me.
I finally buy myself another point and shoot. I realize a lot of photography has very little to do with the equipment. I still have to fight urges to buy great equipment to this day… I am a gadget girl at heart. I started re-learning how to re-focus on composition, on lighting, on how I felt. Then I bought an iPhone and (4 iphones later) I am happy with it as my secondary camera.
I dream about the future of photography. Even now, as steps are being taken to redefine how we capture the world around us, I am only thrilled at the opportunities opening up for us. For me.
And now that I’ve played Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I’m kinda hoping for an ocular implant technology before I die.
My heaven would be a limitlessly beautiful world, and a limitless way to capture and share it. :)
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