An evolution in photography – Chapter One – Wearing glasses made me blind

I don’t recall the first time I used a camera but I do recall my first camera: a Minolta X-700 and I got it in the early 1990’s. I was very fond of that camera and it taught me the basics of shooting. I never formally studied photography, but rather used books and trial and error to understand what I was doing with the camera and the images I got.

Right from the beginning, I was more interested in seeing things around me (mostly nature) rather than using the camera to create magical images. I certainly played around with the camera to achieve some fancy looking shots, but it was just playing. Basically, if I had my camera with me, I would spend more time looking so my camera allowed me to see and study nature. Which was great because I had just finished my BSc in Zoology.

Somewhere along the way I developed a strong interest in marine mammals and this took me and my camera to remote parts of the world to study them. My interest in photography was very clear from the start, in that I was using the camera to simply document what I saw, even though I often didn’t know what I was looking at.

And so this is how my photography began. I simply took photographs of things I saw in nature. I didn’t really understand anything about looking though, and my approach to capturing images was aggressive (completely driven to capture something without spending any time to look at it), slapstick (no standard approach), documentary (boring shots of nature) and often what I saw did not end up on print (because I wasn’t looking).

Damn those stupid glasses…