The Accidental Artist

I got my first camera in 1972 when I was 13. It was a cheap film camera. Before I was able to use it much, it became inoperable when, during an argument with my older brother, he picked the camera up and threw it to the ground, shattering it into dozens of pieces.

Thus it was at an early age any future career in Photography was stillborn.

My next interaction with a camera came in 1982. I was going to Europe and thought it would be a good idea to capture the experience. In 1982, the biggest thing in consumer cameras was miniaturization. I bought a rather sophisticated version of one of these. I could fit it in my shirt pocket, which made it easily accessible for taking snaps as the need arose.

As it turns out I did not end up taking many pictures in Europe. The ones I did take have disappeared into the discarded detritus of my life.

My next shutterbug adventure came about a year later when I took a Black & White Photography class at the Local community college. It was in this class that I began to appreciate what you could express within the medium of photographs. Especially black and white photos. I enjoyed this class immensely and received high praise from my teacher for the images I turned in. [Some of these photographs you will find scattered within my portfolio here.

Despite this successful foray into professional photography, I did not take another picture until the late 2000s. I needed a camera for a business we were developing online at that time. However, with
this purchase gone was the cumbersome film purchasing, developing & printing that made photography an expensive hobby in the past. This was a digital camera from which pictures flowed from the shutter to the computer and then to the page, without ever having to touch the 3D world.

The freedom this digital world gave photographers created an image capture explosion.

Without the major cost factors of producing photos in the past and with the attachment of high-quality cameras to mobile phones, many people found the latent photographer inside themselves, that had simply been waiting to come out. These newly inspired photographers pushed out a dynamism of creativity into the digital world. Most of my camera work during this time had more of an industrial character that was necessitated by my job of the moment.

My business was winding down around 2014. At that time, casting around for something to do, I enrolled in another Community College photography class. It wasn’t until I had a couple of weeks of the class under my belt that I realized that I might not have to take any photos at all for this “photography” class. The class was in reality a Digital Editing Photo-Art class. We were not going to take photos per se but learn how to use Photoshop and other graphics programs to manipulate images in various ways.

This opened a new horizon for me. The
depth and complexity you can add to a static image in the digital world is truly endless. One could spend their whole life with a handful of images and never be at a loss to bring something new and interesting from them without needing to add to the core image count.

So I am now hook line & sinker into the world of digital creation. I take, edit, enhance & manipulate my and others’ photos, I do the same with films and movies and I create simple and complex quality websites. I do this under The MeadowRiver Artist storefront found at meadowriver.com