Digerati is a recent noun, an evolved term, suggesting skills in things digital. Overused in some quadrants, hyped up by others, the term for me, best wraps the on-going revolution taking place in commerce and communications. The skill sets necessary to “get your head” around how digital things are manufactured, accessed, how data is stored, manipulated, displayed and broadcasted has largely occurred in the last twenty-five years. It has been a challenge for most born in the middle of Pax Americana but comes completely natural for those born after the invention of PONG. Take photography, for example, the young folk today will never know the challenge of being hunched over chemical trays developing prints in a bathtub. Or having to move the enlarger to pee. Rather, their challenges are of high ISOs and size of files and learning to make a living shooting pictures when everybody’s telephone can capture the moment. I transitioned from using film cameras to digital ones very early on, in 1995. Setting up temporary darkrooms was too labor intensive. My first digital camera, a Kodak DC40, freed me of the darkroom bathroom blues. But even being a pioneer in this digital age, it constant market and innovation churning has left little time to fully understand it all. I am learning facts and factoids of digital photography in the 21st Century each and everyday. Every week, somewhere on this planet someone comes up with yet another gee-whiz gosh-darn widget or process that startles me in its pure logic and punishes me for not thinking of it first. That is what makes living in this age and focusing on this profession so interesting and fun.
So as life often does, it throws us in all sorts of directions to learn how to react, recover, and hone our skills even sharper than before. I have been exceedingly fortunate that I was thrown a curve late in life and finally pushed down a path and profession in photography that I always knew was there, but was too enamored in chasing brass rings elsewhere. This blog will be record of that attempt. Really no different than a mountaineer’s goal to climb higher mountains or sailor’s attempt to circumnavigate, I am committed to engage and inform, if only for closest patrons, the challenges faced along the way. This is where the concerns collide with being too introspective or divulging a personal flaw. Whatever. In today’s reality show environment, it becomes obvious that the law of the jungle remains constant. You either opt-in or opt-out, you enjoy the read or simply go back to watching House Hunters. It is as simple as that.
So my blog begins. I have been shooting pictures since I was eleven when my father bought me a Polaroid 104 Color Camera. That camera more that any other I held in those days, taught me more about lighting and composition, two of the most important aspects of shooting, than would have believed then. The capability to review, recompose and shoot the scene again is exactly what the digital era has brought to all shooters today; making everyone, who is interested in becoming a better photographer, a head-start toward being one. I sincerely hope you find a few nuggets herein to support your passion for the craft too.
I have reacted to my life like a bumpy road; but my wheels have mostly met it. I admit there have been times it has not been so smooth. I rail against privilege and pine for those intangibles I either cannot reach or left behind. Every day is a lottery for what you win tomorrow. It is the daily wheel we spin.
