When I started photography, I was an ignorant 17-year-old who had just fired a photographer on the school newspaper. I was the editor and I knew I wasn’t getting the photos I wanted, so I picked up a camera — for the first time in my life — and started taking photos myself.
The school paper had a cheap Yashika camera that was fully manual. We had nothing but a 50mm lens. I had nobody to teach me. My early pictures were lousy, but I slowly got better.
By the time I was working at a small daily newspaper as a part-time reporter/photographer during college, I was pretty decent. My new camera was mostly manual by today’s standards. It was a Minolta XG-7 which had a light meter and some primitive program modes, but I had to manually set everything. Focus was manual, of course.
The only lens I had was a normal 50mm lens. But I still managed to get some of the best shots of my life, especially after I discovered I had a talent for shooting basketball games.
For some of us, loss of trust is a deep existential threat to heart
Money is a tool, and it’s useless without real motivation and vision
Silly controversy over Cadillac ad reminds us we want different things
Why do we stay in prison when there’s no lock holding us there?
Midlife becomes big crisis when our self-deception stops working
What if emotional baggage we carry isn’t really our core issue?
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing love