I spent a good portion of my day farting around with photos I’ve been taking over the years. If one would visit my house, I would be more than happy to show off some of my work on what I call my “Photo Wall” in our living room. Not to brag, but I have some pretty nifty pics up there. Makes me wonder what if I had some real professional equipment back, say, when I was trying to decide what to do with my life all those many (too many) moons ago. If I would have had the equipment, I could have experimented some to find our what I was capable of doing… in fact, with 20/20 hindsight, I should have done things differently. Life may have taken me down a different road than the one I took. But there are no do-overs.
Part of what happened is that the passion I had for photography back in the day was superseded by a passion to use what people kept telling me was my radio voice.
My father introduced me to the art of photography while I was still in elementary school. He had a photo lab at work where he taught me the basics of developing black and white film. Developing film was one magic trick he was more than happy to show how it was done. When I was in high school, the neighbor across the street had a darkroom in his basement where he was more than happy to show me how it was done. He later snagged a job as photographer for the school’s newspaper and yearbook, recommending me to be his assistant. I got the job my senior year, the year after the neighbor went on to college.
I was lucky. I had some basic training on how to take candid shots and was able to figure out other basics to the art. When I left high school, photography was left behind. I had other fish to fry.
It wasn’t until about ten years after high school that I started to fart around with a camera again. I had no darkroom available to me other than an uncle’s color darkroom in the back of his garage. I was never able to connect with him at a time when he was actually developing film and making prints, so, I lost out on an opportunity to learn how to use a color darkroom.
My photographic experience was limited to whatever budget I had to go to the drug store to have them develop and double print whatever was in my camera at the time. My budget led to several rolls of film which sat in a drawer somewhere, even decades at a time before being processed.
When digital photography came along, I got on the bandwagon – providing the now former spouse with a camera with a famous name (which she almost immediately complained about for not being exactly what she wanted). A few years and a new spouse later, I finally got a digital camera with a look and a feel like the single-lens-reflex cameras I had been using for years.
The nice thing about having a digital camera is that I can shoot as much as I want without having to worry about wasting film. For a few bucks, I have a chip which will hold thousands of photos. What’s more, using the computer, I can manipulate an image in several different ways, making the photos on my photo walls a little more special.
Such a deal.
What’s an even better deal is that I can post some of the photos I’ve taken onto social media, where my “farting around” has earned me compliments and bunches of “thumbs ups.” I might have done quite well had I pursued my passion for creating great photos as a vocation. Some of the elements to do so were present when I got out of high school – elements I might have done quite well with, had I pursued the passion.
But I didn’t. Water under the bridge. But I sure am enjoying it now!
Be Seeing You!
bdharrellauthor 