1970s: Early Photography Beginnings
The journey begins in about 1974, when I was about 11 or 12. Our elementary school class went on a field trip to the Fernbank Planetarium in Atlanta, Georgia. While we were there we had an opportunity to see all the exhibits including an Apollo capsule, which was very thrilling for me because I was a big fan of the space program (and still am). But it was when I visited the gift shop that everything changed. There I saw a camera for sale – a Diana F—what most people would dismiss as a cheap plastic toy, both then and now. But remembering how much my mother had taken family photos with her camera but never let anyone else touch it, I looked at it as a chance to be independent and take photos of my own. I had some spending money for the trip, so I bought it. It came with a roll of black and white film (in a size I later learned was called 120, the same as medium format cameras), and it had rudimentary instructions on how to use it. I loaded the film on the bus during the ride back to school, and tried taking some photos along the way and later after I got home. My mom seemed a little annoyed that I had seemingly wasted my money, and expected I wouldn’t use it for long because of the cost of film and processing. But my dad thought differently. He not only had my first roll processed, but he also bought more film for me to use. He was interested in photography like I was, and this was his way I think of encouraging me to “do something other than stick your nose in a book.” His interest was in shooting home movies of the family with his Keystone Super 8 movie camera.
I did keep using that camera for about a year, until the lens eventually fell off (the Diana was made of mostly plastic parts glued together), and it went into the scrap heap. But by then my interest in photography had taken solid hold and has been with me ever since.
Within a year or so, I acquired the first of what became several 110 cameras, many of them made by Vivitar. 110 was a very dramatic change from the Diana – the film was only a fraction of the size of the 120 rolls, and it was packaged in plastic cartridges that made loading and unloading super simple – just open the back cover and drop it in. I also first experienced using color film with the 110, where all my 120 rolls had been black and white. The Vivitar and other makes of 110 cameras were more durable than the Diana, but still prone to malfunctions from time to time causing me to replace them every few months. I continued to use these through the end of the decade and into my first year or so in college in 1980-81.
Around 1978, my father began letting me use his Keystone Super 8 movie camera regularly. This was the camera he’d used to document our family life on film, and now it became another tool for me to explore visual storytelling. I remember using it at a family gathering that year, capturing my uncles gathered together in conversation—a moment that became unexpectedly precious when one of them passed away shortly before I attended GHP the following summer. The Super 8 camera taught me that photography and film weren’t just about capturing images; they were about preserving memories of people and moments that wouldn’t last forever.
In the summer of 1979 between my junior and senior years in high school, I attended the Governor’s Honors Program (GHP) sponsored by the State of Georgia. Only about 600 high school students per year were selected from across the state to spend six weeks on a college campus participating in focused “enrichment” courses in subject areas they were nominated in by their teachers (in my case, I was nominated in Social Studies as I had a keen interest in history). When I saw Photography listed among the two-week electives, I signed up immediately. On the first day, the instructor introduced us to the tools we would be using, central of which was 35mm single lens reflex (SLR) cameras. On top of that, we would be shooting with color slide film, and there was no limit to how many rolls of film we could shoot. The camera assigned to me was his personal Olympus OM-2, and he took great care in showing me how to operate it and get the most out of it.
I was over the moon with this opportunity! I took the camera everywhere with me – to class, meals in the cafeteria, concerts, recreational time, and just wandering around the campus. As the boxes of mounted slides started coming back, he would evaluate them and give me pointers on how I could improve my shots… and off I’d go again. I came up with a plan for the slides… We each had to present a final project in my Social Studies group at the end of the program, and I chose to use the slides to tell the “story of GHP”. I selected slides, wrote the script, and then presented it to the class. It was a huge success, with my instructors remarking that no one had ever attempted such a presentation that looked at the program itself before. I took the slides home with me at the end of the program and later made a presentation at my school to prospective GHP candidates.
But even more importantly than that, I knew what direction I wanted my hobby to go.
1980s – First SLR and System Building
I graduated from high school in 1980 and started in college that fall. As a freshman from a working-class family (made even more “working” from my parents divorcing just before my graduation), extra money over and above the grants and loans I had for school was hard to come by. I worked part time on the weekends to cover my expenses, which left little for luxuries like hobbies… but I managed to squeeze in shooting a 110 cartridge every now and then.
As I was looking forward to my sophomore year in the fall of 1981, the rules for financial aid were changing and I was unable to obtain enough funding to pay for tuition. In talking with one of the school counselors, I learned about their Cooperative Education (co-op) program, which paired students up with companies who would hire them to work full-time in their field of study. The pay would cover my school expenses, but it came at the cost of taking longer to finish the degree (work and school would be during alternating quarters, reducing classes to two quarters each year instead of three). It was better than the alternative of dropping out, so I signed up. The first assignment was very generous in pay, and with having weekends off with no school assignments it gave me the incentive to jump back into my photography.
I had been out shopping one evening after work that fall, and came across a display of 35mm SLR cameras for sale. The salesman was another college student who was studying art and photography, and we struck up a conversation about his studies and the equipment he used. I mentioned how much I enjoyed using the OM-2 a couple of years earlier, and he suggested that I continue to pursue working in 35mm. Among the various camera models on display were several Minoltas, and he pointed out one he thought would be a good camera for learning. It was a relatively new model called the XG-A. I looked it over as he demonstrated its features, and I went home with some literature to think about it. A few days later I returned and placed an order for one. Then as now, cameras were sold in kits that included a basic lens in a fixed focal length, as zoom lenses were much more expensive and out of reach for most consumers. The XG-A was paired with a 50mm lens, which was often called a “normal” lens back then (“normal” meaning the field of view was similar to what a person normally sees).
The XG-A represented several firsts for me: first owned 35mm camera, first interchangeable lens camera, first “serious” camera for taking more than snapshots, and first major expense in camera gear. And initially I was scared to death that I might do something wrong and either damage or destroy it.
But I need not have feared at all. I took it everywhere, looking for opportunities to take photos any place that seemed worthy of recording on film. The XG-A was tougher than it looked and got bounced around frequently (before I learned about padded gadget bags, which was later), but it never failed to work when I pressed the shutter button. It was primarily an aperture-priority camera, which I found was an ideal format to learn with as it allowed me to understand the relationship between aperture and shutter speed and how they combined with the film speed to affect the outcome in my photos.
As I built up my experience using the XG-A, I was finding how much having only a single 50mm lens was limiting my photos to the same basic views all the time. I started looking into what I could do to add more variety, and found I would need to increase my investment by adding more lenses. The conventional wisdom was to obtain separate lenses for differing needs, such as a wide angle lens, a telephoto lens, and so on. Zoom lenses were starting to come down in price, making them more within reach (remember I was still in college at the time), but major brand lenses (like Minolta) were extremely expensive. Third party lenses were much less costly, and one brand that consistently stood out was Vivitar. I had determined I wanted a longer telephoto lens, and found Vivitar made an 80-200mm that would fit my budget. I purchased it, and suddenly I could pull distant subjects into far more pleasing compositions than the 50mm could manage. Later I began looking at the other end of the focus range, toward wider angles for landscapes and group photos, and that led me to my second zoom lens purchase, an Osawa 35-70mm. At this point I retired the 50mm lens, as the two zooms allowed me to do more than ever before. I suppose at this stage I could say I had built my first camera “system” but I never really thought about it that way… it was just me and my camera.
I found a very worthy testing ground in Stone Mountain Park, a large state park east of Atlanta. Whenever I acquired a new piece of equipment or wanted to try a different film stock, I’d make a day of driving out and spending time wandering through the park. I became familiar with the granite dome, the surrounding trails, and the variety of subjects from landscapes to architectural details, which gave me a way to benchmark and compare how each new piece of equipment worked and what each new film stock could do. I especially enjoyed trying out new film types, developing a fondness for Fujifilm’s G series and the unique ECN-2 process films from Seattle Film Works, comparing how each rendered color, grain, and contrast. These Stone Mountain visits taught me as much about photography as any book or class could have; it was my personal laboratory where theory met practice, roll after roll.
My interest in cameras didn’t just stop with 35mm. There were other technologies coming out in the 1980s, and I was keen to give them a try when the opportunity came up.
One of these was a new film format called the Disc. 110 cameras were smaller than most film formats, but interest in them was fading. Kodak figured creating an even smaller camera would be very appealing, and so the disc camera was born. I purchased one of their less expensive models called the “Disc 3000” and used it several times. In practice it was handy for situations where carrying my XG-A wasn’t practical, but the images were not much better than the 110 snapshots I had taken years before. It never really caught on with me, and my interest in it faded about the same time as it did for the general public.
Another interest was instant photography. Polaroid had of course been the only company offering instant photography for decades, and when they introduced their SX-70 in the late 1970s with self-contained film to rave reviews Kodak looked at it as an opportunity to jump on the bandwagon. They introduced their own form of instant film and cameras called Colorburst, which developed a popular following but not quite as large as Polaroid. Around 1984, while visiting my college roommate’s home, his family took me to a flea market where I found a Kodak instant camera for sale; it was a model called “The Handle” because its shape incorporated a large handle on one side. I bought it and used it regularly, finding the images were mostly on par with Polaroid’s quality. A few years later, Kodak was forced to stop making the film due to being sued for patent infringement, making the camera no longer usable.
After about four years of using the XG-A, I felt I was reaching the creative limits of the camera and began looking for an upgrade. Given I now had an investment in lenses, I looked very carefully at Minolta’s other offerings. Their flagship camera was the X-700, which offered a Programmed Exposure mode; this was in direct competition with Canon, which had introduced their version called the AE-1 Program. Program mode seemed too good to be true to me, where nothing needed to be done other than pointing and focusing, so I wasn’t very interested in it. Minolta then introduced another model called the X-570, which had all the features of the X-700 except Program mode and at a more attractive price. While I hated to part with the XG-A, I decided to sell it and put the funds toward a new X-570 body, which I bought and immediately put to work.
The X-570 gave me a more robust camera with better features and controls, allowing me to explore more creative work. I shot events for family and friends, including weddings, and more extensive travel photos; at one point it had given me the thought of going into professional photography work, but I decided to stick with just being a by now very advanced amateur. This is the camera that carried me through the remainder of the decade and into the early 90s, when the next evolution in my photographic journey would take place.
1990s – System Switch and Teaching Tools
The decade of the 1990s marked several major changes in my life – marriage, children, buying a home, building a career and a family. My photography hobby changed too in several ways.
As newer generations of 35mm cameras came on the market, older models fell into obsolescence. The trusty Minolta X series camera bodies and lenses I had used for nearly all the 1980s were no longer being made, and it was inevitable that one day they wouldn’t be repairable either. The newer models held a lot of promise, with much of it relying on two emerging technologies – programmed exposure and autofocus. Programmed exposure wasn’t new; it had been introduced in the early 1980s with cameras like the Canon AE-1 Program and Minolta X-700 leading the charge. But I avoided it because I was both not very confident in the technology and very comfortable with using aperture priority modes, opting instead to stick with the non-programmable Minolta X-570. Autofocus was an entirely different matter. How many shots had I missed, or gotten poor results, because I had been slightly off focus? Yes, I was pretty good with using the split-image microprism focusing screens Minolta was famous for, but autofocus promised improved speed and accuracy, which I accepted would be very useful for action shots or whenever I wanted tack-sharp focus.
And so, in the spring of 1991, I started researching what was available. Minolta had their line of program and autofocus cameras called Maxxum, which would have been the logical upgrade from my X series experience. But when I looked at them up close they seemed underwhelming. They were boxy, clumsy-looking, difficult to hold steady, and, well, felt like they were made of cheap plastic… very different from the sturdy metal bodied models I’d always used. Plus, the lenses weren’t interchangeable with my MD series… meaning it required starting completely over with an entirely new system. I no longer felt the loyalty to Minolta that I once had and decided to take a wider view of the market to see if there was something that offered a better solution.
At my local camera shop I asked to look at the other two leading camera makers on the market, Canon and Nikon. Nikon seemed promising and they supported their older lenses, but they were very expensive and I still had the prospect of needing to buy new lenses. That left Canon. Their EOS line was introduced four years earlier in 1987, and it was both more affordable and seemed the more polished of the two. Their camera bodies were still plastic, but they were more ergonomically designed than Minolta or Nikon. When I picked one up it felt more natural in my hand. The controls seemed more logically arranged, and their innovative control dials allowed me to easily adjust settings without taking my eye from the viewfinder, which was important since there were no more aperture rings like before on my Minolta lenses. And the autofocus? Very smooth, accurate, and fast, especially with their “Ultrasonic” lenses which used tiny motors that responded faster than an eyeblink and adjusted dynamically as you followed a moving subject. Zoom lens technology had also greatly improved, and it was obvious Canon had put a lot of effort into making them more accessible to mainstream users.
And so, I made the biggest change in my photography hobby since starting in 1974. I sold my beloved Minolta camera system and switched to Canon. But which model? They had several available, but the one that caught my eye was called the EOS Elan. It was considered an “enthusiast” or “prosumer” model, meaning it contained advanced features that more experienced photographers like myself would appreciate and use, but it wasn’t a full-fledged professional-grade camera. One of the unique features of the Elan was its film advance system; where most cameras used sprockets and a geared motor to advance the film after each frame was taken, the Elan used a friction-fed take up spool and an “electric eye” sensor to track the sprocket holes as the film was advanced using a whisper-quiet belt drive. Canon advertised it as the quietest 35mm camera on the market. It was paired with a 28-80mm Ultrasonic “kit” lens that was very high quality. It wasn’t cheap by 1991 standards, but it was affordable for me.
I soon put the new system to work, and it met all the promises Canon had made and more. Remarkably, that camera was my mainstay for the next 15 years and countless rolls of film. It was with me when I proposed to my now-wife in 1993, recorded the birth of our first son in 1994, chronicled birthdays, holidays, trips, and everyday life. It was finally retired from regular use when I made the jump to digital photography.
As my children grew they began to enjoy seeing the photos I took of them, but it was difficult to keep their interest as the film processing cycle was longer than their attention span (load the film, take the photo, rewind the film, take it in for processing, and finally see if the photo was good). In the later part of the decade I decided to try a different approach… instant photography. And with the demise of Kodak’s instant photography products, there was only one player left – Polaroid.
Polaroid had flooded the market in the 1980s with instant cameras that used a self-contained film, a far cry from the peel-apart “pack film” that established them in the industry. There were three major formats of self-contained film called SX-70 (first released with their then-revolutionary SX-70 folding camera), 600 (for mass consumer sales), and Spectra (an enhanced version of 600 which was larger and more upscale). I had owned and played with a 600-type camera back in the late 1980s called the Polaroid Impulse; its selling point was the inclusion of an autofocusing system based on a “sonar” rangefinder built into the front of the camera, giving it a distinctive look. It was rugged, simple to hold and use even in small hands, and the self-contained film made it virtually foolproof – the perfect choice for a youngster.
I went shopping online (in itself a novelty in the later 1990s) and found where there were literally hundreds of Polaroid cameras for sale on various sales websites. I acquired several Impulse cameras to outfit myself and my two oldest children (the youngest of three was born in 1996 and wasn’t quite ready yet), and we would take turns going on adventures on the weekends. I would show them what to look for and how to take a photo, and then we would take photos together and compare them. The instant format was perfect for this, as they could immediately see the results. As we went out more, they got better and were very proud of their work; the younger of the two insisted on keeping all his photos in his own album, which I gladly bought for him.
With the end of the 1990s, more changes were coming to my life outside of photography… but there were many new things to come in that world as well. New technology, new interests, and new roads to explore.
2000s: The Digital Transition Years
The first decade of the new millennium marked a fundamental shift in my photography hobby for several reasons. Priorities change over time, and mine were no exception. My family moved to a new state (from Georgia to Texas) so I could take a new job, my children became more involved in their own pursuits, and during this busy season of my life photography became more of a documentary medium for family milestones than one fueled by creativity.
But despite these relatively quiet years, my interest in learning about the advances in photographic technology didn’t stop. And with the huge shift in the industry from film to digital photography, there was plenty to learn.
I started out cautiously, as I always have. By this stage I was fully engaged in the concept of digital imagery; in the 1990s the industry had introduced the concept of the “Photo CD” where film was developed using traditional methods and then scanned electronically, with the images then burned to a compact disc. The disc could then be viewed on any computer or even printed locally without having to send negatives to a photo lab. But actual digital imaging without the use of film was still evolving.
My first hands-on experience with digital photography technology was with a camera made by Polaroid called the PDC-640. Polaroid had been testing the waters for some time, looking at digital imaging as a logical complement to their instant photography and to jump on the widespread adoption of home computers. The PDC-640 was a digital point-and-shoot camera with a fixed lens, built in flash, a tiny display screen, and a 0.3 megapixel sensor. It took photos at a resolution of 640×480, which in the day was comparable to a VGA computer display. I got it mainly to see how its image quality compared with the Photo CDs I was getting when my film was developed. I learned quickly that the film scans were vastly superior, and I soon set it aside as an interesting but not very useful technology for my use. There were much more sophisticated digital cameras on the market and the technology was improving all the time, but at the beginning of the decade they just weren’t within my reach.
My continued interests took me in one final direction in film during this period. A few years earlier in 1996 a new format was introduced called the Advanced Photo System or APS. APS was created by a partnership between the major film and camera manufacturers to bring a smaller and more capable film “system” to market that could appeal to professional and amateur photographers alike. Among its technical innovations were tighter film grain for increased sharpness; a smaller physical size allowing cameras to be made smaller and lighter; a sealed film cartridge that made using it virtually foolproof; and magnetic striping that recorded exposure information for each frame directly on the film itself to help when making prints. But its most widely known feature was the ability to produce images in three different formats called C or “Classic” (the same dimensionally as 35mm film), H or “HDTV” (similar to wide screen or HD televisions coming into use), and P or “Panorama” (a very wide 3:1 format previously requiring specialized cameras and film). It seemed like a brilliant move forward, but between the costs for completely new camera gear and specialized film processing equipment, and the onset of digital photography which also recorded exposure information for each frame, APS was mostly relegated to niche uses.
My opportunity to try APS didn’t happen until 2005. While I was on a business trip to San Francisco, I had a couple of “down” days and decided to play tourist… but I didn’t have a camera. While I was wandering along Fisherman’s Wharf I came across a storefront selling cameras, so I walked in. The salesman tried to show me several high-end models, but all I was interested in was a simple point-and-shoot for tourist snapshots. I noticed some Minolta cameras on display, and feeling nostalgic I asked to see one. He handed me a Vectis 30, which was the first APS camera I’d ever held. We struck a deal including a couple of rolls of film, and away I went. The rest of the day was spent playing with the camera and trying out the various modes while capturing scenes along the waterfront. Two memorable images were that of a pair of ducks sitting on a wharf railing with Alcatraz Island in the background, and a panorama shot of a World War II Liberty Ship berthed nearby as a floating museum. I brought the camera home from the trip, but it turned out to be the only use I made of it. When I got the images back from the rolls, I saw the limitations of the format compared to my existing 35mm film, and decided it really was a good idea that came a little too late.
The following year, 2006, brought the most significant change in my photography since the switch from Minolta to Canon SLRs. Digital SLRs (or DSLRs) had advanced significantly in development since the beginning of the decade, and Canon had introduced a line of digitals that were suited to my quieter interests at the time – the EOS Digital Rebel series. The second release in what was ultimately a very successful series was called the Digital Rebel XT, and it had quite a number of innovations including a then-impressive 8 megapixel sensor (24 times more powerful than the PDC-640 just a few years earlier), multiple exposure modes and wider exposure latitude compared to film, improved focusing modes, and very important for me, full compatibility with my existing EOS Elan’s lenses. Ironically, the sensor format was the same size as APS film – called APS-C in digital terms (the only physical feature from APS technology that actually survived). It was very affordable compared to their other DSLRs… and even better, it was featured in a gift catalog where I could use hotel points accumulated from my business travels to purchase one. When it arrived and I held it for the first time, I felt a bit of a spark for this hobby that I hadn’t felt in a long time… it was a new technology to learn and master, but with an old feel from a brand I’d been familiar with for 15 years. I put the camera to work almost immediately and was impressed with the quality of the images I could record. I was still a bit reluctant to completely abandon film altogether, but after a few months of using the XT I felt comfortable enough to leave the Elan in my camera bag for good.
While my interest improved, it still wasn’t up to the level it once was a decade earlier. But seeing the promise of the technology and the direction forward, it helped lay the groundwork for the future.
As the decade was winding down, I found my son who’d had an interest in instant photography years before was starting to show a new interest as he was getting older. By 2009 he was in high school, and his interests were mostly in his studies and playing in band. The band was planning a trip and he mentioned wanting to be able to take photos of the trip. That set me into thinking about what kind of camera he could take. 35mm film by this point was on a sharp decline, and he was limited in what he could take with him so a SLR or DSLR wasn’t really an option. I decided to look into digital point-and-shoot cameras, and one of our local stores had several Canon models. One in particular, a PowerShot A490, was the ideal size for his needs, with simple controls that didn’t require studying a manual for hours to figure out. It had a 10 megapixel sensor, actually more than my larger XT, which seemed counterintuitive. It also had one other feature that was a surprise – the ability to shoot 640×480 video… a capability I hadn’t thought about since the Super 8 days. I bought it and after giving it a test run myself I let him take it on the trip, and it generally stayed with him afterwards for some time.
By 2010, my transition from film to digital was complete. Film became a memory, but the techniques I’d learned during the preceding decades never really went away. Film had taught me to think before I took the shot… considering lighting, composition/framing, anticipating action, and so many other factors. The camera simply recorded the results. Those lessons continue to guide my work to this day. Overall, the choices I made during these years were not so much of a person as deeply immersed in this hobby as in the past, but more pragmatic choices as a person who wanted to keep my hands in my lifelong interest while life called me elsewhere. Who was I to know that the coming decades would depend so much on the foundation I had built during this “quiet time”.