...and life before DIGITAL!
Yes, boys and girls - there was photography before digital cameras!
Some people have wonderful memory capabilities.
I have blurs.
Some people can tell you exactly how old they were, what the weather was like, what they were wearing, what the make and model was, what the occasion was, and maybe even what they had for dinner the evening before when they got their very first camera.
I can tell you that I was a child, at least 8 to 10 years old. I was wearing clothes.
It was summer, or fall, or maybe spring? It might have been winter.
I'm sure I had eaten dinner the evening before.
I have NO idea what the make or model of the camera was. I'm not even sure that it was given to me to be my very own - I might just have had access to it periodically, but I think that I thought it was mine.
What I CAN tell you is that it was not an expensive or fancy camera. It was a small film point-and-shoot camera with a flash... and I had a BLAST taking photos!
That was the beginning.
Earlier this week, I raided a box of old photo albums in the closet in the spare bedroom of my parents' home. I was looking for these (see above).
(Isn't that an awesome hanging lamp in the first photo?! Nothing like growing up in the 70's!)
Okay, what can we learn about this young budding photographer by looking at these photos?
Hmmm.... not the greatest understanding of how lighting works.
Composition's not so bad but could use a little work (the photo of my younger brother on the horse was composed by my "tunnel-vision" brain saying, "how cool,...a HORSE!" I didn't even realize I cut off the top of my brother's head - I was just focused on the horse. And of course, I did not see the poo pile until after the photo was developed.)
I guess "tunnel-vision" could also describe my choice of subjects. Most of my photos taken during this time of "first excitement" were of animals. I have a photo of two dogs who lived at a motel we stayed in on our way to a family vacation to the Grand Canyon. Now that's a treasured photo!
The two dogs above really were treasured family members. The Sheltie was mine - Brandi. The black and white Corgi-looking mix was first my dad's (he is the one asleep in the recliner), and then my brother's. Boliver - named by my dad after some famous Red Skelton character. We called him Boli (the dog, not my brother - we call him Mark).
Then there's my mom in the poorly-lit photo with the cool hanging 70's lamp, and my grandma in the nicely composed and interesting-choice-of-wallpaper-and-chair-fabric-mix photo, and you've already been introduced to my youngest brother on the horse. (We call him Kirk... my brother, not the horse.)
I hope you can see at least a little improvement between my first offerings and the photos lined up on my Portfolio page now! I could say that the improvement is all in the camera, but to be honest most of the photos I have promoted in my Portfolio were taken with a point-and-shoot camera (digital, with some minor editing of course)...before I got my first DSLR.
I can look back over the years of my life as a photographer and see the changes and improvements in lighting, composition, contrast, and color, as well as cropping, editing, and even creative artistic design. It's fulfilling and challenging at the same time to take a photo that catches my eye in a unique way every time I look at it. (And the digital world makes it so easy to take as many as we want, and then edit, organize and preserve them indefinitely!)
But there's still nothing like pulling out one of those old, early photo albums, blowing off the dust and getting lost in the memories of the fading and discolored prints!
Try it for yourself....and while you're at it, photograph some of those old photos to preserve them in whatever form of decay they've reached at this point. Save some of those old memories before they're faded completely!