(that's me and my granny j... i'm sure she's imparting wisdom i would later pray for. i miss her everyday. she was such a wise and worldly lady... )
when i picked up my camera (canon AE-1 from my granny j) i took it all in. the whole world, frame by frame. i never worried about creating art, or selling anything to anyone. i captured what i saw, the way I saw it. i was excited for any chance to take in something new. i would spend hours and hours exploring and more money than i could ever count on developing and learning the hard way that sun flare doesn’t always do what you want it to, you have to MAKE it. i remember the first time i really understood that my aperture controlled depth of field. it was like i had discovered GOLD! i made my sister and friend pose in front of the shower curtain in our bathroom and stopped all the way down to 1.4 making one blurry and the other in focus. i was in heaven. i hadn’t even hit puberty yet.
my pursuit of photography continued and i’m sure my friends and classmates grew TIRED of having me snap away. i would head to walmart everyday after school and wait for my order to come in. (thank goodness you didn’t have to pay for what you didn’t want… because i screwed up A LOT) i would joyfully share the prints with the newspaper, yearbook, friends, family, my scrapbook, and anything else that could be decorated with the stories of my life. i was addicted. photography was an outlet that i never dreamed would carry me through life. i don’t think i was capable of dreams that big.
years went by and i continued to work hard at nailing exposure and understanding how my camera worked. funny enough, i didn’t actually know the “real” terms for aperture and shutter speed until YEARS later and was MORE than embarrassed a few times when discussing my work with “real photographers” who would grill me on how i was getting my results. i just knew how to work my little AE-1. my camera was older than me, and much wiser than me on many counts. without words it taught me more about myself and others than i would ever understand. sometimes i think about my granny j traveling the world with that camera around her neck… i wonder what it taught her. i wish i could hear those stories.
when i realized that photography was going to be the thing i pursued in this life, i declared (at my university) that i would study to receive my bachelor of fine arts in photography. wow. that’s a mouthful. here is how it translates in life: you have to take every art class, tons of photography classes, most classes are 3 hours A DAY long, you normally have 2 and then you spend time developing and printing, which is normally a solid 8 hours. i had two jobs, i would combine work into two days, and then shoot, process, and print the other 5. i was a workhorse. i loved every second of it. i can still see my classmates prints on the drying wrack. we would tear them apart. we all wanted to be great. my favorite professor would always say that out of the 40 or so in each class, there would be 2 of us left. shout out to Clark Lara. (i think it might just be you and me homie.) we were artists in training. my business just happened, because i had to make money while i spent half my day in the darkroom. the first 3 years of my business i shot with my hasselblad on TMAX film. color projects were only for record labels- that was the only time i shot in color. i was learning to see the world in black and white. the zone system was how i looked at everything. i didn’t shoot weddings then either, they freaked me out.
i continued to document my life. trips i took, places i went, friends i had… i shot it all. i was always giddy to head to the black room to load my film. it was like a gift each time i would pull it out of the developer. i was a sponge. i took in everything around me. my classmates were some of my greatest inspiration. i wouldn’t trade studying art for anything. i really began to explore what i was made of. i had searched for satisfaction for years. i was finally onto something.
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