The Photo Journal

My family had two cameras when I was young. A Minolta Freedom AF point and shoot and my Dad’s Minolta SRT-101 SLR from when he was in high school. The family photos were shot on the Freedom AF and the SRT-101 mostly sat in its carrying case in the closet. As I got older, my dad pulled it out for me to play with. He showed me to how to use the light meter to get a good exposure by manipulating the shutter and aperture and how to focus the 50mm 1.4 lens he had for it.

I ran a lot of Kodak Gold through that thing. Most of it sucked. Eventually, some weren’t so bad. I made images on anything I could get my hands on. I used the SLR, I used the Freedom AF, I used disposables. I loved it. In high school I took a summer camp that for graphic design and photography that had us in the darkroom making prints. I even reached out to a local commercial photographer for an internship (it didn’t work out unfortunately).

My first step away from film was to a Fuji Finepix hybrid camera thing. The ergonomics were horrible and the images looked terrible. I didn’t realize that at the time, I just thought that I all of a sudden sucked at photography. Looking back it was actually how terrible that thing was to use.

Flash forward, in 2007 I got a Sony Cybershot, something like a DSC-W710 or something of that ilk. I took it everywhere with me and took thousands of pictures on it. Snapshots of things I was doing, people, I was with. I shot considered (for a teenager) portraits and motion blurred party pics blasted with the onboard flash. I shot landscapes and my shoes on my feet at my desk. It was really a companion for me to document everything I did. From the mundane to the fine art (such as is possible by a 17 year old).

In 2009, I got my first DSLR. A Nikon D90 that I begged and begged my parents to help me afford because it would have taken me years to save for it solely on my grocery store paycheck. I received it for Christmas.

I shot that thing mercilessly.

I shot everything, I got so absorbed into photography that I became obsessed with learning all I could, trying every technique, buying all the gear.

I spent several years shooting that D90. It was a phenomenal camera. I used it on my first trip to NYC with my then girlfriend, now wife. I used it when we went to Scotland over our first wedding anniversary in 2014. In 2014 I took 3,820 pictures with that camera.

In 2015 it was 1,014.

In 2016 it was 37.

I had lost what I loved about photography. I had become so obsessed with making perfect, magazine worthy images I forgot why I loved photos in the first place.

It wasn’t until 2021 that I bought a very used Sony a5000 that I shot from January to March and started feeling the rhythm again. I shot 299 photos with that camera in those three months. I bought myself a Sony a7C in March and shot 910 more images the rest of that year.

I’ve shot more and more since then.

In 2024 I took 14,234 images.

I’ve wondered casually for the last several years why I fell out of love with photography. It’s only this month that I’ve realized why. I had nearly lost the spark with the Fuji FinePix and had quashed it entirely after 6 years with my D90 for two reasons.

1. The Fuji was horrible to shoot. It was cumbersome, no fun, no manual control at all and the images looked terrible. It didn’t feel like an extension of me.

2. With the D90 I had become so obsessed with technical perfection that I hated almost everything I shot. I was loaded down with gear, textbook knowledge and lost my vision.

So what’s the takeaway to all this?

I have found that there are some simple truths to my love of photography.

1. I am passionate about recording my life in images. I love grand vistas, beautiful studio portraits but also snaps in the car, selfies, blurry party shots and the sometimes mundane details of my life. Images that show a broad picture of my time on Earth.

2. I have to feel connected to the camera that I am using. I felt connected to my SRT-101. I felt connected to the Sony Cybershot. I felt connected to my Sony a5000 and I feel connected with my Sony a7C and a prime (I have zooms and they are, noticeably, less fun to shoot). If I do not feel connected, like it’s a part of me or if it is too cumbersome, or too many lenses, I won’t use it.

3. The power of a photograph is the feeling it evokes in you. I am not someone who loves an image just because the light on a park bench is beautiful. I want beautiful light on a dear friend reading on that park bench. Hell, I want strangers, an old couple in love perhaps, on that bench in that beautiful light. There has to be something in the frame that evokes feeling and connection.

4. I want to harness that power to tell stories - stories about me, my friends, my family and people I interact with. I want to foster connection and community with people.

These things are true for me but may not be true for you. You may love technical architectural photography. You may love only landscapes devoid of people. You may love macro photography of bugs or photographing local flora and fauna alone in the woods. That’s wonderful and I’m sure your images bring you and others joy. But that’s not why I shoot.

I always felt a sort of gap in my photography. I’d make nice images and I’d be happy with them. But there was always something missing. Over the years, I have realized I don’t really shoot groups of images. Or at least not until recently. I was taking one off images that looked nice but didn't really fit together. I began to want to make sets of images that told a story, like a photo magazine. A hero shot for a cover photo, the inside lead, the tight portrait, the secondary shots and the detail shots. Sets of roughly 9-15 images that tell a more complete story.

Then I realized I wanted to add text to accompany my images. I wanted to use amplifying narrative to expand on the images, give them context and detail and anecdote.

After trial and error and testing several different ways to share this content, I realized I wanted to hand write my narrative and pair it with images embedded in the text. The vision was of me in a cafe somewhere in the world with a beat up notebook, a pen and a mini photo printer, madly writing out the days happenings and adding contextual images at the same time.

Although that sounds insane, and the workflow seems incomprehensible, I have found a way to make it work with how I live, travel, take photos and journal.

I’ll be doing a series of posts explaining my process, my thoughts and philosophy. I will also be posting photo journal galleries here on my site to give you an inside look at how I have come to find and practice my little niche in the photography world. I’ll be documenting my workflow, how it evolves over time, what I find works and what doesn’t and how the project grows and shifts. In the galleries I will select photo journal entries with images and narrative text for a look at the output from the project.