“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”
– Dorothea Lange
“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
– Joan Miro
When I was 9 or 10, my father bought me a Kodak 110 point-and-shoot camera. It was easy to use, had a built-in flash, and looked something like this:
I don’t know how much he paid for it. Dad was the frugal type, so I’m sure it wasn’t expensive. But it was one of the very few times in my life that my father passed on something he loved that did not involve sports or the military.
I didn’t comprehend it then, but it’s striking to me all these years later that my father always had a camera in his hand. Any time there was a special occasion–a birthday, a vacation, a trip, or just a simple gathering of friends or family–Dad had his camera out. Never a fancy piece of equipment of course. Dad wasn’t a fancy guy. His camera of choice was a cheap Kodak Instamatic, and it modeled him: simple, unadorned, and easy to understand. What you saw is what you got. A point and shoot. No fiddling with apertures, shutter speeds, and changeable lenses. To hell with that shit. Dad was in the moment, man. He saw something he liked, a special moment about to happen, or a group pose he felt compelled to construct, and he needed to memorialize it ASAP. He wasn’t going to take the time to learn the ins and outs of a camera’s mechanics, how to manipulate light, compose a shot, and create a masterpiece. That wasn’t him, and it was way too complicated. Why do all that work when you can just enjoy the simplicity of capturing a moment time by just aiming and pressing a button? Let the camera handle it!
So no, my Dad wasn’t a “serious photographer” in the classic, learned sense. But he was a very serious photographer in his love of photography, freezing time, and snaring a memory. He loved the control involved in staging a photo, and he loved looking at his pictures afterwards and reliving the moment, whether it was in flipping through stacks of developed photos that he picked up from Fotomat or in gathering my sisters, mother, and I for an annual review of the trays upon trays of Kodakachrome slides that he made from his photo negatives:
Remember Kodakachrome slides? No one remembers slides. I have all of my Dad’s slides stacked in a closet. There must be at least 25-30 trays of them with images of my grandparents, parents, myself, and my sisters in our younger days. At some point I need to get them converted to digital before they get destroyed or fade away.
I’d like to say that my Kodak 110 kickstarted my photography addiction but that’s not what happened. As with my mother’s cooking, which was gourmet level and so good that I never bothered learning to cook myself, I never got into photography back then because my Dad had it covered. He was so into it that it watered down any interest that I had.
Later on, one of my close college friends took a photography class, did the whole film and darkroom thing, and it still didn’t stir anything in me. (I took a painting class instead and loved it.) Developing film seemed like a shitload of work, and when he explained all the settings involved in serious photography, it gave me a headache. No thanks.
Three things changed all of this.
1. After I graduated college, my parents gifted me a trip to Italy and a 30-day Eurail pass as a graduation gift. I spent two summer months visiting my family in Italy and then another month traveling through Germany, France, and Italy with my Eurail pass. My father let me take his camera to catalogue my trip. If memory serves, it was a 35mm point-and-shoot Vivitar like this:
I used this thing to catalogue everything on my travels, buying new film along the way. Candids of my Italian relatives, action shots, landscape shots, friendly strangers I met in train stations and youth hostels, tourist shots in Zugspitze, Paris, Nice, Pisa, Naples, and Palermo. I even figured out how to take selfies using the timer on the camera, clearly a man way ahead of his time.
I had no idea how these pictures would come out until I got back to the United States and had a chance to process them. Today they are some of the most precious pictures I have because they captured a special moment in my youth when I was approaching the biggest crossroads that I will ever encounter in my life. I photographed Italian aunts and uncles, my grandmother, and my great grandmother laughing, vibrant, and happy. Now many of them are dead. Those days are long gone, but I still have my pictures to remember them. My photos of this time in my life are priceless.
2. When I returned to the States, I was an indecisive 21 year-old still trying to figure out to do with my life. I had just experienced a slice of grown-up independence traveling on my own for months, where I had to rely on myself to navigate foreign countries I didn’t know and interact with total strangers on a daily basis. It was life-changing.
While I was figuring out the next phase of my life, I took a job covering local sports for a town newspaper–everything from adult league baseball games to high school track meets to Special Olympics tournaments. In addition to writing articles for these events, they gave me a camera and told me to take a few pictures for the events that I covered so they could print them in the paper next to my articles. This camera was no point-and-shoot. It was a professional camera– a Nikon where you could change lenses and had to select the aperture and shutter speed for your photos. The thing had a zoom lens attached, so it was friggin’ heavy too. This was the first time in my life that I held a serious camera in my hands.
I told my boss that I’d never shot a camera like this before and had no clue how it worked. In response, he said three things: (1) The camera was set to automatic, which was just like a point-and-shoot, so I didn’t need to do anything except focus on the subject and try to compose a decent shot that they could use. (2) I wouldn’t be changing lenses; the zoom lens would allow me to get close to the action from far away. (3) Don’t break the camera. It was expensive.
These small local newspapers had tight budgets and weren’t going to pay a separate photographer to photograph these events. In fact, my pay was a pittance. (Lifenote: if photojournalists were paid more, my life might have taken a different path entirely.)
Still, I couldn’t believe they were trusting me with this expensive piece of equipment. It was like giving a student driver the keys to a Ferrari.
As instructed, I took the Nikon to some sporting events and did my best to get a few decent shots. I had no idea how they would come out. Again, this was 1990, and we were still using film. There was no looking at the back of the camera, deleting all your shitty photos, and starting over. I had one roll of film, maybe two to use, and that was it. I wouldn’t know if I captured anything decent until I saw the results after film processing. I figured that once my paper saw how lousy my pictures were, they’d either send someone else to photograph these events and just let me write my articles. Or possibly fire me entirely.
Well Dear Reader, to my great surprise, my photos did not suck. Quite the opposite. I got some really good results, to the point that my boss told me they were surprised that I’d never used a real camera before. And once I saw my black and white photos in the paper with my name credited as photographer, in addition to the byline for the article I wrote, oh man, I felt a kind of pride that I’d never felt before. It’s one thing to do something well that you’ve worked for and practiced for a long time. It’s quite another to do something well when you really didn’t expect to and didn’t know what the hell you were doing. Somewhere in my files, I have a folder with clippings of these photos in them. Yet another thing to digitize before it’s too late.
This positive experience opened the door to serious photography for me. Still, I wouldn’t actively pursue photography as a hobby for another two decades. There was so much to learn and there are great photographers everywhere you look. As with my Dad growing up, this somehow watered down my interest. In my mind, if I couldn’t be as good as them, or even close to it, photography wasn’t worth seriously pursuing. I eventually got over this self-defeating mentality, which, relatedly, has plagued me in different ways throughout my life, including in my chosen profession.
3. In 2006, I was invited to Japan by one of my college friends who was living in Tokyo at the time. We were now well into the digital age, and I had owned a handful of point-and-shoot digital cameras, including this Canon PowerShot S45, which had only 4 megapixels and a tiny sensor (by comparison, my current Samsung cellphone has 12 MPs):
The evolution to digital photography made many things easier. Instant results, instant deletions, instant improvement, no waiting for film processing. There were new things to learn but certain mechanics of photography had become much simpler and more accessible.
My trip to Japan was going to be the longest trip I might take in my life, a 14-hour flight to a country where, unlike Europe, no one spoke English. It would be my first truly foreign trip since I was two years old. Once I booked my ticket, a voice in my head told me that I needed to get a serious camera to catalogue my trip so I would get the best images possible. I might never go there again, so I had to make these memories and images count. A point-and-shoot with 4 megapixels wasn’t going to cut it. So I plunked down some real money on a 10.2 MP Nikon D200, my first real camera:
It came with an 18-70 mm kit lens, which allowed for a decent range of photos, and allowed me to change lenses as my skills improved. Room to grow. The money I spent on this camera committed me to taking photography more seriously.
That’s me holding this camera in the Travis Bickle mirror selfie you see above, in my halcyon hair days.
Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to learn how to use the D200 before my Japan trip, but I learned just enough to photograph my travels in a more serious way than I had done in the past. Nervous about missing any shots, I stuck to automatic settings on that trip, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. My focusing and composing skills were amateurish, as one can readily see in many of my photos that weren’t level or sharp, or which lacked background and edge control. Others were full of noise, which I knew nothing about back then, much less how to avoid it. Almost all of my photos look like your average tourist photo, as my cousin Claudio aptly pointed out in my recent trip to Italy. In retrospect, I cringe at some of these photos.
Still. A seed was planted. I got the bug. Surprisingly, some of my photos came out decent despite my lack of skill. I knew I could get better if invested the time and effort. My Japan trip proved to be the true genesis of my passion for photography, which continues to this day and goes hand-in-hand with my love of travel and exploration.
But improving my skills has proven to be a much slower process than I anticipated back then. Life interfered. I got married, had a little girl, and got immersed in the suburban life and a busy job to fund it all. Then I got divorced and dealt with the fall-out from all of that.
But like my father, I took my camera with me to catalogue this life journey, both the good and the bad. Instead of hiring a professional photographer, I took M’s newborn photos, which we used on birth announcement cards that we sent to loved ones. Two of those photos are framed and hanging on my wall. I photographed M’s birthday parties when she was a baby, her school activities, Christmas mornings, Halloween costumes, and simple things like her playing with her toys. I took pictures of our troubled dog Angus, from the day we adopted him to just before he died. I photographed each trip I took with Ex, including a trip to Utah before we got engaged, our honeymoon to Turks & Caicos (where she seemed depressed the entire time), our second honeymoon to Italy in 2012, where our differences began to be laid bare, and our miserable trip to the DR just before we separated, when I realized our marriage was truly over. Today, those pictures are bittersweet indeed. I haven’t processed some of them for that reason.
I graduated to a Nikon D700 with different lenses that I learned how to use. I signed up for an online photography class. I bought Photoshop and learned the basics of digital processing, another critical photography skill.
I’ve had this hobby for nearly 20 years. Given that amount of time, you’d think my photos would be better than they are, but until recently, I didn’t invest the kind of time required to really improve my skills. Now a few YouTube videos can teach me in an hour what used to take me days of reading to understand. (I’m a visual learner, apparently.) With my latest camera–a mirrorless Nikon Z8–I’m finally learning how to manipulate all those settings that used to intimidate me and evolving into a more serious photographer who doesn’t rely on automatic settings. It’s not easy, and it takes a lot of time and trial and error, but I absolutely love it, because it combines my obsession with freezing time, my addiction to learning new gadgets, and my love of continued self-improvement into a hobby that has become a true passion. I only wish I had more time to pursue it. But at least now I’ve learned to just enjoy where I am and stop comparing myself to National Geographic photographers.
With that exhaustive and self-indulgent introduction out of the way, I recently decided that as enjoyable as photography is for me personally, sharing my favorite photos with others would make it even more enjoyable.
Rather than create an entirely new website for my photos, I created a photo gallery as a separate page on this site. You can access it either though the menu above at “DIDOMENT’S GALLERY”, or via this link.
For me, this gallery marks different stages in my life, places I’ve lived and visited, and my development and evolution as a photographer. As with these personal posts of mine, I’m happy to share it with all of you, warts and all.
