Watching the dust settle on numerous pre-historic film cameras in the closet, I was aching to get back into photography 18 months ago. The expense of buying film, shooting film conservatively, developing film, paying extra for CDs, tossing bum prints and ordering enlargments & copies was incomprehensible. What was Kodak thinking?!? The real expense was the years of not pursuing this passion and losing the opportunity to capture the sights I have seen and the people growing up around me.
A modest investment later and bam, I'm rushing to catch up for lost time, and capturing whatefer I can, whenever I have time, but now on a hard drive. Gone are the days of conservative shooting in fear of wasting film, and now are the days of rifling off 400 shots within few hours or a weekend! Gone is the pain on the wallet and gone are many high school and college days in the dark room. But bam, now there's sleepless hours pursuing the challenge of computerized photo editing.
Last Winter a frat brother from college (Jeff Swensen), who I had neither spoken to nor seen in 21 years, found me on Linkedin, which led to reconnecting with another college friend (Elizabeth "Buffy" Suhr Heisey). Together they shared with me their creative images on blogs and social networks. Fortunately, during a business trip in August, I was able to visit Jeff in Pittsburgh(Buffy was out of town), at his studios in an old formerly refridgerated warehouse on the River by the train tracks overlooking da 'burg. Discussing our lives aside, I listened to stories about his fascinating career in Photography. He introduced me to Justin Merriman, who like Jeff travels the World freezing life with lenses. What one can learn in only 3 hours of time!
I have "lens envy" when seeing what these 3 artists (and others) can do with theirs. I'm inspired indeed; checkout their blogs to see why (links on the right). However, I'm proud that a fellow soccer Dad in town has lens envy when comparing the size of his lens to mine. Perhaps there is hope for me.
So this blog serves to show how I choose to and am able to freeze life with my big lens! Yes now indeed!
To kick it off, I must thank Swensen for his inspiration by including the shots in this post, which he took of me in da 'burg. You won't see lots of shots of me going forward, because I'll be the guy behind the lens!
3 comments:
Niiiiiiice! Good to have you blogging! And I'm bummed I missed you in Pittsburgh... but there are more trips to come.
I like those photos - who took them?
Theron
Photos in this post were taken by Jeff Swensen: www.jeffswensen.com.
You gotta read to catch the facts, now!
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