Capturing a photograph was never really my interest when I started. I was always interested in the process of the darkroom. More in particular it was how light shined onto a piece of paper could transform it to an image using chemicals. I have always been a visual person; I’m horrible with names but things I see I always remember. I never even picked up a camera until I was out of my teens, not until a certain moment had changed that.
In my early twenties I was in the hospital for a short time. While there, this older nurse would always check in on me. She would come by and had asked me about hobbies or interests and that’s when we started talking about photography. One day she had brought in her small albums of the various lighthouses she had photographed. As I looked through her album I thought to myself, this is something I can do. This is a way I can show people what I see through my eyes.
When I left the hospital the next day I sold a few personal items and bought my first camera. It was a Canon Rebel G with a 35-80mm lens. That next week I had signed up for my first classes as well. It would be six months before I went to my first darkroom, and the very first roll of Kodak T-Max film I would shoot would be on Sept. 11 2001.
Sorry to say that my pictures were not the best, in fact I may have done better if I had simply left the lens cover on. However, that first experience in the darkroom had sealed it for me. I would spend hours beyond class time in that room, often forgetting that I had other places to be or that the class that was in there, was not even my class. It was also in that year that I saw the first digital camera. I don’t remember the model but I know it was a Nikon, and I simply wrote it off. Boy was I wrong.
Over the next eight years following that stay in the hospital I picked up and put down a camera, sometimes there were long intervals between shooting. In that time I had also converted from film to digital. Most of my inspiration comes not from artists, rather the people and things around me. I’m lucky to say that I’m surrounded by talented people in various fields.
It’s from them that I get my ideas on the next things to capture and create. I have always said that I do not know where I will take my photography to. For me it’s always been about seeing if I can match the image I see in my mind. It’s about pushing me to a different aspect of photography to see if I can do it. As long as I enjoy photography, I will always continue doing it.
Links
http://www.flickr.com/photos/photosbynim/
www.NiMphotography.com
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