Some Credibility

I come from a long line of photographers. My father was a photographer in high school and during junior college, working for his father shooting weddings and other events. My dad switched to building later on and hasn't looked back. My grandpa, on the other hand, has pictures in the Smithsonian and has photographed tens of thousands of people, including JFK and Barbara Bush.

So maybe the line isn't so long, but I've still got the genes, right?

I like to think so.

Grandpa gave me a camera when I was eight or nine. It was a little plastic thing that had a knob with pictures of a cloud, a sun, a flower, and a lady with cloudy hair. I took some pictures on a backpacking trip with it and they all have this weird white streak through them.

When I was seventeen, I asked him what camera he would recommend for me next, and he gave me grandma's Nikon point and shoot. She hated the one he provided to her as a replacement, and I loved the Nikon. It knew my thoughts. I didn't have to change any settings because it had no external controls other than power, zoom and timer. From sunrises to giant moths, that camera magically drank in light and cranked out nearly flawless images. I used it to shoot a photo that ended up on the yearbook cover of a school I went to. I should have stuck with the magic camera.

But no, I had to move onward. This time, Grandpa gave our family his Nikon FA, a 35mm SLR with a 35-105 zoom. And he gave me some advice which I have since come to treasure (but at the time almost completely ignored). He told me to read the instructions all the way through and familiarize myself completely with the camera before I shot one picture.

That camera was FUN with a capital FUN! I was shooting on program and aperture priority modes and I was GOOD. I could shoot standing handheld shots at 1/8 of a second and have the image focused on the eyes and crisp. I was using quality film and paying for quality processing. I took some senior pictures and random stuff and I still have an album on a shelf in our office with shots from those first few rolls with the FA.

There was a slight issue I couldn't figure out: I could focus the camera so that a near subject was looking great, but the background was always so blurry and I had to be somewhat close for a clear shot. One day, my dad noticed that a friend of my sister's had the same basic haircut as me and he wanted to take a picture, so I got out the nice camera and posed with my "twin." I remember my dad distinctly saying something about how the focus wasn't right, and then some nonsense about how the lens was in macro mode. Huh. I hadn't shot a single picture on that camera up to that date with real control over what I was doing.

Fast forward to fifteen years later. I now have dozens of weddings under my belt, a construction business and, oh-I-almost-forgot, a wife and three kids with baby number four about two months away. My wife is a TRUE professional with a website and nice gear and everything. I am now firmly in the "second shooter" position when we take pictures together and I keenly feel the need to sharpen my photography skills in a major way. I want to earn at least half of our living through photography and I want to control the camera and the light in a way that makes me excited and confident to load my camera bag in the car and capture memories for someone.

So here is the project: I will set goals for myself every week to polish my shooting skills, beginning with the VERY BASICS, and I will keep a journal notebook and a blog running to mark my progress. I picture myself a few months down the road as a sort of ninja, reacting almost without thinking, getting shots I never imagined could come from me. If you are shooting on the side for friends and hoping to go pro yourself, or just wanting more control over your DSLR (that's Digital Single Lens Reflex, a kind of camera for those of you not yet "in the know"), I hope to offer you inspiration and resources your might not yet have come across. Hopefully I won't flake out ;-)

Look, Ma, I'm blogging!