[geolarson2]

So since I've given it nearly a month since posting, I figured I'd toss in my own story (Rob did post his story about starting FTV elsewhere, which is a really great read BTW).

When I was maybe 6, somewhere around 1976 and atFleet Week San Francisco I got to use a camera for the very first time. It was a 129mm point & shoot thing--crap, really, but when I got back my first photos, one of the USS Coral Sea, another of the USS Halsey, some of the aircraft & Blues Angels, I was thrilled. Skip forward roughly 6 or 7 years and I dug out my dad's old Kodak Retinette 1A. This is a rangefinder camera, meaning you look through the little window that runs through the body giving you an approximation of what your photo will look like--the disposable cameras you buy at the store work on the same principle. The difference is that with the Retinette you are in control of the shutter speed & aperture. That means a bit of doing math in your head. Along with the camera went a Sekonic light meter (a pain in the butt to use, but something, in the electronic form, which some photogs use even today in conjunction with the metering systems that are built into more and more systems), and a Honeywell Tilt-a-Mite parabolic flash. This is a wicked cool flash system that uses one-off flash bulbs. Where that one day circa 1976 had gotten me interested, it was pulling out this dusty old case full of retro photo equipment circa 1983 that got me going. This was pure trial and error for me. I hadn't taken a photography course anywhere, I just had the owner's manual for the camera, the instruction book for the light meter, and a guide for reconciling the shutter speed, flash bulb & distance from subject. There was a lot I quite simply didn't get, but I learned even if it took I don't know how many rolls of film to get a single decent shot. Two things came out of the Retinette. First, I learned some of the basics about balancing speed & aperture, what an f-stop is (hint: the smaller the number, the larger the opening, thus the more light that gets to the film, the question, then is for how long). Second, I showed how much I was willing to learn about photography and so fir Christmas 1984 I found under the tree an extra-special gift from S. Claus, namely a Minolta X-370 with normal (50mm) & telephoto zoom lenses, UV filters & electronic flash. I got my first opportunity to try out the kit a short time later at the Monterey Bay Aquarium which had recently opened, and managed to get one decent shot, but a few months later, on a trip to Yosemite, I did a lot better. In my junior year of high school (maybe it was my sophomore year--I'd have to dig out my transcripts, but I'm too lazy and its not that big a deal) I took photography to meet my art requirement and wound up spending quite a lot of time taking photos after school and almost as much time in the darkroom spooling my film (or the film of my classmates--turned out I had dexterous fingers in the dark!), or using the enlargers to make prints. This was all black & white work; I never got around to learning how to process colour film or develop prints. One thing I do regret is not taking more photography courses in college, or pursuing something which has given me a lot of pleasure through the years. Anyway, I continued to use that very same Minolta kit right up until 2007. Early that year, I bought a "last years'" Canon Rebel Ti 35mm. It has some drawbacks--the light metering system, which like my Minolta is internal, is on a different scale than I was used to, but it was something that I got used to pretty easily, and unlike my other cameras the body is plastic instead of metal, but it was what I could afford. To be honest, if I wasn't getting older and my eyes less reliable I'd probably still be using the Minolta, but the Canon offered me something that I didn't have before--autofocus! I love composing photos--its the best part of photography for me it what leads up to pressing that shutter release button. Its adjusting the dials, paying close attention to what I'm seeing through the viewer (and with the Minolta and Canon, what I see really is what I get in many ways--unlike the rangefinder system, these other two cameras are SLRs, which is short for Single-Lens Reflex, which means that there's a mirror inside the body that when the shutter's closed reflects what you see through the lens up into the eyepiece). I often switch back and forth between a wide-angle lens and a telephoto zoom, but I'm still sorting out the E-TTL flash (this is a newer flash, electronic as with the Minolta, but one which gathers information from the camera and adjusts itself so that, in theory, it casts just the right amount of light on the subject (TTL is short for "Through-the-Lens, BTW). On the plus side, I don't have much call to use the flash, yet. Most of my work has been done with landscapes, frequently at sunrise or sunset--things that you wouldn't use a flash for in the first place, and things that are more inclined to make me adjust my settings manually to get just the right exposure. Now that I'm comfortable with the Canon EOS system, though, and since I'm tired of paying processing fees, I'm actually contemplating yet another change, this time to a digital system from Canon which means that my lenses & flash will work just fine. So there's a "brief" outline about my own foray into photography. There's a bit more, such as studying the work of photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter and others, but I'll leave that alone for now (whew!). The important thing here is really to show how I started off building the fundamentals and mentioning that there's a difference between book-learning (in this case reading the instruction manuals) and real-world practice (i.e., actually getting out in the field and taking photos), and even if one out of a hundred is gold and the rest are stuff you wish you hadn't gotten on the bottom of your shoe, that's the way just about anything works--you learn by doing.