I remember the day clearly: it was during the first week of junior year at Balboa High School. I’d signed up to be part of the yearbook staff, and the school paper, and I was taking a journalism class. This was in the days where I was writing pretty much every single day and wanted to grow up to become a writer (I did eventually write and publish 11 nonfiction books, but that’s a story for another day).
The sponsor for the yearbook was also the high school’s journalism teacher. I can’t remember her name, but she had brown hair and was slim and dapper. I do remember what she said, though: if you want to really have a great career in journalism, you need to learn how to handle a 35mm camera. Anyone who volunteered to take photos as well as write would get trained in using the darkroom and the high school would pay for all the 35mm black & white film you could shoot, as long as you took lots of photos of sporting events, after-school clubs, and all of that.
Well, that sounded pretty cool to me. At this point in my life, I was in about year five or so of my family being a solid member of the evangelical movement. Over the course of those five years, my personal liberties had slowly been eroded to the point where everything I read, watched, or did was being watched with eagle eyes. Any and all art I was making at this point was confined to doodles in notebooks that I kept in my locker at school, mostly because I was making a LOT of art about Dungeons & Dragons and hard rock/metal bands, which was verboten with the Born Again crowd.
I figured photography would be super acceptable because my dad had been something of a shutterbug when he was in his 20s and 30s, and so was “Uncle” Bob, one of his best friends, and my brother’s godfather. Oh, and Mrs. White, who was our high school guidance counselor, was also really big into photography, and she was one of the very nice adults in my life trying to get me squared away and ready for the future.
So I immediately leapt at the opportunity to pick up photography. We didn’t have the kind of money that other families had, so while some of the other kids showed up to the yearbook’s photography workshops with brand-new Canon Rebels (I can still see Andre Agassi in those commercials), Minoltas, Leicas, and Olympuses.
Instead of any of those super duper awesome SLRs with autofocus, I inherited a beat up but incredibly serviceable Pentax K1000 from a much older cousin who had moved on to something fancier. It came with a pretty good 50mm lens, a dead light meter, and three other fixed-length lenses of varying quality. I remember a 135mm one that was pretty good, a 200mm that a spot of mold somewhere in the mechanisms, and a wide-angle lens.
Because it had no light meter, and I couldn’t afford a hand-held one, I immediately had to learn how to figure out exposure just by eye. That took a bit of doing – I think I went thru about ten rolls of film that were over- and under-exposed before I got it.
And then I realized at some point that photography was a subtractive art form (ie, your eye and brain do a marvelous job of focusing on what it wants, but the camera sees ALL and you have to take things away in order to take good photos) and so I learned about f-stops and depth of field. And then came the rule of thirds. And then I started messing around with shutter stops, and dropping filters in front of the lens, and things kinda took off from there.
And yes, in and amongst all the fun I was having, I also burned through about 100 rolls of film covering student life, sports, clubs, and everything else that happens to teenagers in high school. I became one of those really annoying camera people who take candid photos like these:
But also, when Operation Just Cause in Dec 1989 happened, I got a press pass and started taking pictures of what was happening around me as US forces deposed Manuel Noriega.
I went on to college, met my future wife, got married, finished grad school, entered the dot-com startup scene, started a company, and later worked for giant companies like Apple and Google, and all along I kept taking photos. Of things I saw during our travels:
Of animals and flowers:
And LOTS of mountains (I love them so, and luckily we have tons of them here in and around Boulder):
But always, having fun, even if it was just a cheeky snapshot:
Even though I’m not as serious about my photography as I used to be, I can tell you that all the lessons have stuck with me. Even when we’re at 10,000 feet, snowshoeing at Brainard Lake, and the temperature is pretty close to 0 degrees F, and I want to take a candid photo of my wife staring at a mountain in the distance, and I have to pull my gloves off and get my iPhone out, I still remember all the rules of composition to make something interesting:
How has any of this helped me with making art with paintbrush or stylus?
- Developing an eye – when you take lots of pictures, you develop an instinct for what might be a good shot. You start to see drama, contrast, movement, all of it. You start paying attention to patterns, and details. It’s a great way to go through life, seeing all the tremendous little vignettes in every corner of existence.All of it makes you want to capture that stuff with a paint brush, charcoal, palette knife, whatever. A tiny example of this: I learned early on in photography that what makes a great portrait is how the eyes look. It’s what really draws a viewer in. Same thing with painting!
- Mindfulness – somewhat related to developing an eye, mindfulness is just about being in the present. Because photography has become so democratized (after all, billions of humans now run around with a fairly decent camera on their smartphones) its become super easy to just sit somewhere and take 30 or 40 photos of a building or flower or yourself. It’s hard to imagine a time when you had just 12 or 24 shots on a roll, and you had to actually think about what you were looking at through the viewfinder because you might not actually capture it quite right.The same goes with sitting down to paint a scene. You might be doing it in plein air (ie, standing in a field with your easel and paints and brushes) or you might be sitting in a studio with nothing but a memory of a scene in your head. Either way, you have to focus, you have to be in the moment, and you have to be able to really take in those details.
- Composition – I talk about this a lot, but once you start delving into photography for any amount of time, you get exposed to composition. You start applying the rule of thirds, which will immediately improve everything you do. You start looking for opportunities to zoom in, or out. You start seeing and leveraging patterns (concentric circles, vertical/horizontal/diagonal lines). You start looking for either balanced or unbalanced subjects — and you really pay attention to the ways that contrast and color affect everything.All of this has direct parallels with the world of painting. In fact, when I started out painting, I realized very quickly that just pushing paint around on canvas wasn’t going to cut it. I had to have some kind of structure, and I landed on composition as the one thing I knew would help me. I eventually did a lot of online research, and created a series of tutorials for other artists to follow, and 99% of it was on composition.
- Everything can be adjusted – yes, right now, you can take a photo with your iPhone, drop that photo into a piece of software, and crop, filter, fix contrasts, and do all kinds of interesting things. Anyone who tells you that this is cheating and that before the advent of digital cameras you had to be actually good at photography are pulling your leg. I can’t tell you how much stuff I’ve fixed/adjusted/tweaked in a physical darkroom. Burning, dodging, cropping, you name it. (And all of that stuff has informed my work with the light effects available in Procreate, oh by the way). So even though you really do want to take the best possible photo, you can adjust things later if you need to.Same goes with painting–oops I messed up….let the layer dry and paint over it. No biggie. Or fix it while it’s still wet (oil painters excel at this, as it can take days or weeks for a layer of paint to dry — and even then, they can add a bit of solution to get things moving again). This is a very helpful outlook on life – that you can certainly make life easier for yourself once you know what you’re doing, but that mistakes aren’t catastrophic or irreversible.
