If you follow me in Instagram, you can skip this preface. Otherwise, read on… A few days ago I returned from the hospital after having what one doc called “major surgery.” I’m a little beat up mentally and physically and it has severely interfered with my mobility. I’m hoping it doesn’t interfere with creating new posts on this Blog but it may and if it does, I apologize. If you notice any changes you should know that I’m alive and just need to get through what may be an extended rehabilitation. I can provide updates—this is going to take months—but only if you want them. If one person says, “NO: they will intermediately stop.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity. —Douglas Adams
Many of the biographies that appear in on professional photographer’s websites and blogs include a phrase like: “Having more than 25 years experience…” Heck, I’m even guilty of some of this. The Bio page on my car photography website used to say “Over the past 40 years I’ve written and published 37 books, more than 3000 magazine stories and many thousands of blog posts.” I didn’t use the same words for the About page on this site or not even on my current car photography website. All of which got me to thinking: What is the starting point when we begin measuring our photographic experience?
It’s All An Experience
So the first question is: Do we start counting with the very first photograph we made? When I was eight years old my parents gave me my first camera, a hand-me-down Kodak Brownie Target Six-20. I remember the first photograph I made with it. The photo was of an American flag flying from a pole in Baltimore’s Collington Square park, next to a bandstand where the city’s Municipal Band performed free concerts when I was a kid. The pole and bandstand are long gone but you can see a modern interpretation of that photo here.
How I Made this Photograph: I made this image of three Studebakers and a Packard on a bridge at an Orphan Car show in Golden, Colorado.Toward the company’s ends, they merged forming Studebaker-Packard. The camera used was a Canon EOS Rebel T3 and the EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye USM lens (at 15mm.) I used a three shot bracketed sequence that was processed using HDR Efex Pro. The nominal exposure was 1/1250 sec at f/8 and ISO 200.
Alternatively, maybe we should start measuring our photographic experience from when we made our first photograph “on purpose,” as compared to when were just making images documenting our lives. In that case, it happened during the summer between elementary and high school when I went to Washington DC with my friend Danny McKernan and shot several rolls of the city’s sites using Kodak 620 black and white film in a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, that was another gift from my parents. If you ever wondered why so many of my books are dedicated to my parents, I think this should tell you why.
The Brownie Hawkeye was a Bakelite box camera that made twelve 6x6cm images on a roll of film and was manufactured in the USA (and France) between 1949 -1961. An older friend of mine, who built his own telescopes, made an adapter for the camera allowing me to use a yellow filter that an uncle had given me. This same uncle, who worked at Technicolor labs, would later process (for free) my 35mm Ektachrome E-4 film I shot with a graduation present Argus C3. Yup, that was another gift was from my parent.
Or was it the first time somebody paid me for my photography? This was the sort of measurement I used in the “40 Year” comment on my writing career. My first actual paid photographic assignment was a magazine article about a music store in Baltimore that was something I shot with a Mamiya C33 and Kodak Tri-X 120 for an article I worked on with my writer friend Fred Roark. Or maybe it was an annual report for a shoe company that I shot for an ad agency I did some work for. Or even maybe it was a wedding. These all occurred around the same time during the 1970’s. I’ll let you do the math because when I started counting the years, I also started feeling really old.
Back when Shutterbug magazine sponsored workshops one of my co-seminar leaders once told our students that some people say they have “20 year’s experience” but what they really mean is that they have one year’s experience twenty times because they keep taking the same photographs over and over. And so, my friends, the next time you go out to make some photographs, try something new. A while ago, I wrote a post c alled, “Some Advice for New Photographers.” If you have time, give it a read and use it to build your own, new photographic experience.
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