I am now old and retired. My day job never was officially a photographer, but this has been one of my more pleasurable avocations for the last half a century.
In the late 1950’s and in grade school I was the nerdy kid who knew how to operate all the movie projectors and how to splice movie film. Before I began high school I was developing my own film at home and printing my own pictures.
In the early 1970’s I took pictures of the ancient ruins at Baalbek, Lebanon the great pyramids of Giza just south of Cairo, Egypt and the Parthenon on Acropolis hill in Athens, Greece.
My first camera was a Kodak, but the first 35mm camera I ever owned was made by Petri. The first SLR with changeable lenses I owned was a Yashica. I still have four old Nikon film SLRs, and I guess a total of about thirty of these old 35mm cameras. Also about five old medium format film cameras. The brands of these old cameras include Petri, Kodak, Pentax, Yashica, Cosina, Nikon, Nikkormat, Canon, Olympus, Argus, Minolta, Vivitar, Ricoh, Bell & Howell, Wollensak, Voigtländer, Ensign, and Mamiya.
After WWII all the German patents for cameras and photography were invalidated and thrown into the public domain. The Japanese took full advantage of this. For the next fifty years they made the entire gamut from the very cheapest cameras to many of the finest quality.
I
learned basic computer programming in college in the late 1960’s and got my first computer in the late 70's or early 1980’s. When digital photography first became available to consumers it was interesting, but for anything larger than snapshots it just didn’t have the resolution to compare with film and chemicals.But by the mid to late 1990’s digital film technology had reached the point where I went fully digital. The advantages were tremendous…instantly being able to review your picture. You could take 100 pictures and throw away 99 to get that good one. To be perfectly honest, I did the exact same thing back in the film era, but it was very wasteful of film, chemicals, and photo paper.
In the early 21st century I occasionally play with medium format film photography, but even for enlargements as big as 20” x 30” I find that my Nikon digital SLRs provide adequate resolution and sharpness.
There are many software programs to edit digital pictures. I happen to prefer Photoshop, but
lots of others are just fine. High dynamic range photography is fun to play with too. This is where the computer combines several under and overexposed pictures into one really wild, psychedelic picture.Over the years I have sold a few professionally framed enlargements, and my pictures have been in few books, on wedding cards, several places in Wikipedia, and most recently in a European travel guide published in Great Britain. But the hobby has never come anywhere near to breaking even or paying for itself. It is kind of like being a professional athlete, artist, musician, scuba diver, or pilot. These are all wonderful and pleasurable pursuits, but only the top one half of one percent of all people can manage to put beans on the table if this is their only day job.
I find it far better to just to pursue the hobby of photography for pure pleasure. To me the greed of trying to make money from it corrupts the beauty and wonder.It costs a lot of money to have all the finest gadgets and equipment. Kind of like with golf, or owning a horse, or a boat. That is fine. I accept this. I cannot paint or do much of anything else artistic. I am more of a nose-to-the-grindstone, show-up-everyday type of guy. And this is the one area where I can be a little bit creative and artistic. Once in a while I even manage to make something a bit beautiful too. Photography sure is a nice hobby.
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