In The Beginning...

I've been interested in photography for as far back as I could remember. I remember my dad using a camera he had bought in Korea during his time stationed there during the Korean War. 

This camera had all the bells and whistles for a camera from that period. It was so cool to me because it had several different lenses. My dad once said that this camera was so advance it could stop a fighter jet. Of course he was talking about the speed of the camera working in conjunction with the right film. This didn't stop me and my brother from having a good laugh envisioning my dad standing on a runway holding up the camera to stop an oncoming jet barreling down the runway.  

I tried to learn how to use the camera and even brought it to high school during my tenure on the school newspaper. I wasn't a very good newspaper photographer. Either because I was a teenager who thought he knew everything or because my dad didn't have time to show me I didn't know how to use the camera properly.   

The camera was returned to the closet and not used very much, if at all, after 1982. Everyone had Polaroid cameras with their pictures that developed immediately. Who needed such a fancy camera when you have your pictures develop right in front of your eyes?

The photography bug finally bit me for good in 2009 when, for our wedding anniversary, my wife bought me a Fuji FinePix s2000hd. This camera did it for me. I was so fascinated by all the different modes you could choose. It even has HD video recording capabilities.

Fuji FinePix s2000hd

Although I had read the manual and started using the camera immediately, I didn't have a full understanding of all the functionality of the camera. To learn more, I started listening to photography podcasts, especially the PhotoFocus podcast with Scott Bourne and Rick Sammon. They used words like aperture, exposure, ISO and white balance. Words that had no meaning to me.


Slowly but surely, I started understanding how to use aperture, exposure, ISO and white balance to make images. I applied what techniques I could to my Fuji and the images I created.  Learning photography techniques by listening to podcasts is a good start, but you really don't learn until you apply the techniques using your own camera. Only then can you put two and two together and have a "ah ha!" moment. 


My "ah ha" moment came when I was using the Fuji to take photographs of the small waterfall in our backward. I had been adjusting exposure on the camera, taking pictures of the waterfall. Exposure was one of the few features on the camera that you could control. There was no aperture adjustment because it's not a SLR camera. The first picture that I took of the waterfall with a fast exposure, probably around 1/500, was this one: 

When I reviewed the picture in the small screen on the back of the camera, I could see that the fast exposure produced a photo with a lot of detail. Water drops and splashes were "frozen". Ah Ha! So I thought, "What kind of results would I get if I took a picture of the waterfall with a longer exposure?" The result, probably taken with an exposure of around 1/100, was this picture: 

The water looked as if it was flowing over the rocks. No definition, no splashes or drops frozen, just the water flowing over the rocks. Ah Ha!

Finally I had an understanding of the relationship between movement, long exposures and short exposures. I finally understood to "stop that jet" you have to use a fast exposure. If you want to have that jet show motion and streak across the picture, a longer exposure is used. 

My enjoyment of photography has only grown since that time.  I soon moved up to a DSLR and fell further in love with photography.