1990-2011
But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.
~ David Hockney
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
My first serious camera was a Soligor TM SLR that my father had bought for himself in a rash of enthusiasm, but never used. He gave it to me in 1977. My biggest frustration with that all manual, match-needle TTL metering camera was that it had no on/off switch. Winding the film on turned on the meter. The only way to turn the meter off was to press the shutter button and take a photograph. I was a student, color slide film was expensive, wasting a shot to save the battery was painful.
Anyway, I was taking pictures for more than Hockney’s 20 years before I made the first image in this gallery. With the price of color slide films that I used, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, etc, I might only have averaged a dozen rolls a year prior to buying my first digital camera, a Nikon D100, in 2003. At 432 frames a year, it would take 23 years to get past Cartier-Bresson’s first 10,000 worst pictures. Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that the first image I choose to show on this web site comes from 1990, 23 years after I got my first adult camera.
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