When I sat down to write my first blog post, I found myself wondering what people would really want to know about me or my photography. Should I talk about my latest adventure? Or should I go back to the beginning?
I decided the best place to start is with why I got into photography in the first place—and why I’m still drawn to the kinds of images I create today.
I’ve always been both creative and curious. I’ve also always loved the outdoors. Backpacking, camping, and canoeing into remote, hard-to-reach places have long been part of who I am. That desire to explore has shaped not only how I travel, but also how I see the world through a camera.
I was 16 when I bought my first camera: a manual Canon AV-1 35mm film camera, along with a handful of lenses and a darkroom setup. I still have that camera, and most of those lenses, today. Back then, I shot plenty of rolls of film that were hardly worth printing—and a few that I proudly enlarged into giant posters. Everything I learned came from reading, experimenting, making mistakes, and trying again.
I still remember one of the first times I took my camera out on a hike. It was a cool, cloudy, late-fall day in Wisconsin, and I was shooting black-and-white film. The woods themselves didn’t seem all that visually interesting until I came across what looked like an old party spot with beer cans scattered on the ground. For some reason, I decided those cans would look far more interesting hanging in the trees than lying in the dirt.
So I spent the next hour climbing around and placing beer cans in the branches like oversized metallic leaves. One of my very first photo shoots ended up being trees filled with beer cans. I still remember showing those images to my parents. Let’s just say they were not overly impressed. The people who drank the beer might have appreciated them a little more.
Somewhere along the way, those “beer tree” photos disappeared, though I still have boxes of old negatives and plenty of memories from those early experiments.
At one point, I had planned to go to school for photography. But my high school counselor talked me out of it, convincing me it would be a starving profession. Instead, I went into printing, advertising, business, and marketing. Even so, photography never left me. It remained a constant thread throughout my life.
No matter where life took me, I always kept a camera close by. You never know when the light will shift, when the weather will change, or when a fleeting moment will appear that deserves to be captured.
In my next blog, I’ll share more about those early years of shooting manually and developing my own images.
