2. My journey starts here!
My journey stats here—Well not really... it started about 50 years ago in New York.
My photo journey began when I was six and was handed a Kodak Instamatic camera. As would be expected I took very unremarkable pictures—but once I threw away all the pictures with a giant blob of a thumb in the corner, I enjoyed looking through the stack of prints that began to pile up. Over time I’d flip through them again and again and put the ones I liked best into a separate stack and eventually an album.
Six years later, I took my entire $300 summer camp counselor salary hopped on the train to Manhattan and came home with a shiny new Canon Æ1 Program* with a 50mm lens. Ever since then, I have walked around observing the world and taking pictures of whatever caught my eye or interested me.*
Over the years through some classes, seminars, magazines, books, and working with a couple of teachers I made some progress. I showed pictures in an enthusiast exhibition once, and another time hung a show in a local coffee shop for a few months. Recently I’ve really enjoyed sharing photos on Instagram and in a few Facebook groups.
But really, over the past ~15 years my photography became stagnant, growth disappeared, and my picture-taking was a bit aimless.
About four years ago my passion and excitement got reignited** and over the past year I’ve put a lot more time, energy, and passion into growing as a photographer.
Now today I have a great photo teacher, three photo communities, and am once again growing, I think… (how does one ever know?).
Subscribe and I’ll take you along on my photography journey.
Warmly,
josh
* I got my money’s worth out of that camera—I used it for about 20 years then sold it to a college student. I hope it’s still out there in active use.
** In a future blog I’ll write about what reignited the passion.
Good luck on Substack, Josh! Your photos are great!
I, too, started to get more serious about photography in recent years (when I stopped working as a design academic in 2018). Like you and so many others, I migrated from analog to digital but my way of seeing the world and my photography have not changed very much. It takes effort to break out of routines. And social media sites like Instagram encourage random acts of photography (and lots of them). It's hard to know where to focus our time and where we might find like-minded people (rather than agreeable and not-so-agreeable bots).
Good shots here, especially the last two. Nice short posts. Keep them coming, Josh.