Images
I don’t have much recollection around the first time I intentionally used a camera, if my memory serves me right we always had a few lying around the house. Those were mostly disposable ones, documenting daily life with an internal recall more tangible than my own.
One device was slightly more permanent than the frail plastic ones, this camera was jet black, it might have taken a combination of batteries to unsheathe the diagonal lens hood to prompt the flash from time to time, and occasionally it mitigated hamster eyes.
Cameras and camcorders were mostly for family use, holiday cards, vacations and gadgets to fidget with; to squirm at when you were prompted to pose for a given shot.
There were parties with disposable cameras that were housed in some sort of greenish or yellow print design, descriptors not attached to my memory. I mostly wanted to trigger the flash you could get by slapping the base of the plastic contraption on your palm. Those mechanisms rattling about, discharging at random.
They kept my childish hands busy. Like a rudimentary number game, you could crank the camera’s dial down, registering how many clicks you had until the film roll ran out, but even at zero the smack flash would continue!
Maybe those films were developed, maybe they were just discarded, or the plastics could have been given to someone else to scrap or later process. If the image survived, someone who happened upon their existence might be left to decipher who was who.
I didn’t really have a significant intrigue about cameras but I was casually drawn to images that were lying around in boxes and scrapbooks. I was also given disposable ones to take with me on random outings.
Of the photos that I remember having taken in my early teens, or at least being intentional about, the ones that stand out to me — or at least indicate some growing interest — are from the U.S. Open National Tennis Center, where on my first visit I had a film camera. On subsequent trips was able to use a digital one.
Outside of getting a photo of my favorite player — Rafael Nadal, during warmups on film — there’s not much noteworthy about the photos from these trips, but they felt like great photos because I was conflating the photo’s technical quality with the memory they gave me access to.
Around this time my parents realized I was getting interested in taking photos and for one Christmas got me a more capable digital camera dubbed the “Canon PowerShot“ which in my mind was as valuable as a professional camera.
I was very cautious to use it, that trepidation was exacerbated by my parents’ initial appall that I planned to take it on a field trip. They laugh now, though on my first outing the camera was tethered to my wrist like some sort of newly grafted vital organ.
With that digital camera in hand I started to act on my interest in photography. I wanted to get a better sense of how to actually take photos and manipulate the camera but I didn’t fully understand the process or the full capabilities of my pocketable device.
At some point during my freshman year of high school there was an after school club led by a local photographer offering critiques. I signed up and brought my tennis photos taken with my digital camera and lightly edited in iPhoto.
Being as self conscious as I am, the fact that I don’t recall collapsing internally and ripping apart the photos at the conclusion of the meeting indicates that whatever the critique, it wasn’t too harsh on me and didn’t discourage my interest.
The only thing I recall from the meeting was one set of prom photos getting a very detailed post-mortem, where the photographer honed in on the girl’s exposed shoulder and how the lack of definition, from either the lighting or the clothing, was unflattering.
The model’s brother just happened to be in my year, I don’t know if that analysis ever made it back.
At the time I thought the critique was of the model, but maybe it was meant to be for the photographer and their composition of the subject? For some reason this detail is the one that stuck with me where I couldn’t grasp if the portrait was meant to serve as a reflection of the subject or the one who constructed it.
The meeting wasn’t a bad experience in that it didn’t leave me feeling dejected, but it did make me realize that I didn’t have much of an understanding as to how images were captured even though I was making ones of my own.
I had no technical understanding as to how film, digital cameras, and professional ones operated. More of those meetings might have happened, but they easily could have conflicted with my classes and tennis, so I didn’t end up going to another.
But there was still something about images that piqued my interest even though I dreaded, and still to this day, cringe when someone takes my picture, or worse yet I try to pose for my own.
Throughout this period there was something that prompted me to invest in a “grown up” camera of my own. I cannot point to a singular moment, I probably just wanted to better understand how to more easily capture images to better document life.
