One of the most visible trends at the beginning of quarantine was that people were using it to pursue hobbies that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to; for my dad it was making cocktails. For my younger brother, it was video games. For my mom, it was yoga. This didn’t continue as far into our current situation as I thought it would, most likely because everyone had to get to figuring out how they were going to get through this absurd time. Personally, I found a lot of time, being that I was doing online schooling and almost nothing else. Mainly I found time to actually bring this magazine to fruition. It probably would have never been finished if I had returned to the Academy, where there’s a million competing demands that don’t leave time for doing things that you actually enjoy. However, with the magazine came a place to display some of the photos I’ve taken over the years. That is, and will probably be, the purpose of this magazine for the foreseeable future. Despite this, I’ve always had a passion for photography and believe that it has turned into a lifelong hobby at this point. There were not a lot of good things about the pandemic, but at least it gave me a chance to realize this passion and put it into practice.
The best place to start, I found, was just going out and shooting. I went to the city with my mom and shot skylines. I met up with my friends and took portraits. I went to Wisconsin and tried my hand at wildlife photography (with little success). In my opinion, going out and doing something is the best thing you can do to learn it. This started with my digital camera: an entry level DSLR that I got in sixth grade. A few National Geographic dvds and hours of YouTube later, I was finding control of more technical aspects of my DSLR such as aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and white balance. Any experienced photographer would probably read that statement and say “duh”, but this was a big step for me. Once I understood those, I started trying to develop my own artistic vision. I had a lot of fun playing with perspective, something that can drastically change the feeling of the same scene taken different ways. I even went on my own sort of photo retreat at our house in Wisconsin. Picturing myself in the woods with my camera and a dog makes me cringe a bit right now, but I really enjoyed letting myself focus solely on making photographs for a few days. It was this initiative that made my photos better and more of an enjoyable process.
Usually I’m a sucker for a good advertisement. In this particular case, it was an advertisement for something that I didn’t need nor could have used even if I did want to. It was an ad for film developing. I had never used a film camera but I kept seeing the ad so I became extremely intrigued. I did a little research on and looked at some instagram pages and was hooked. I think it was just the aesthetic of it that was so appealing to me; the grainy, warm photos looked so cool and I decided to ask my grandpa if he had any old film cameras lying around the house. According to my mom, he was an avid film photographer back in the day. She reminisced about him carrying around film and creating slideshows with his pictures that everyone loved to go through. Thinking about it, I had even seen some of these slideshows. When I went over to my grandparents house to look for them, he had already found a whole box full of cameras, film, and lenses, some of them even dating back to the early 20th century. His favorite was a Ricoh 35mm that he had gotten when he was in navy flight school near the end of World War II. I could not for the life of me figure out how to get that working, but there was a Minolta XG-7 that still worked extremely well and I decided to start with that. I went to Walgreens and bought some cheap film for way too much and got started.
35 millimeter film is the most popular film format for consumers and is pretty easy to pick up. The DSLR that I started with was all manual- my recent proficiency with the three main components of a camera (aperture, ISO, and shutter speed) helped with that. I learned how to use the light meter in the camera to avoid overexposing my shots and after two rolls of film that came out completely blank because of improper loading, I finally had some really cool pictures. Shooting with this camera was a slower, more involved process that I enjoy a lot; it forces you to understand your environment and really think about what you're shooting. Another type of film photography that was also making a comeback at that time was disposable cameras. Those are the cameras that your mom used to give you for your field trip in 2nd grade, the plastic kodak ones that you give to Walgreens and receive as a stack of 4x6 inch prints that you hang up in your room. People on TikTok were doing some cool things with these and even some of my friends got into them. The usability of those led me to Goodwill auctions, where I spent about $30 bidding on used point-and-shoot cameras, two of which ended up working. The point-and-shoots have the ease of a disposable with a little bit more control and some features that allow you to take quality pictures. Developing the film is a whole other world. I had to figure out where to get it developed, which brought me back to the ad that first got me interested in film photography. Much to my excitement, the boutique photo lab (called Gelatin Labs) also offers scans of the photos to be emailed. That allowed me to post them on Instagram and have them on my phone. There is a lot of dispute out there about whether or not film photos should be edited, but I will admit that I edited some of mine in Adobe Lightroom. Even figuring out how to use the package store to send my film was a bit of an adventure, but I ended up beginning a friendship with the people who work there and would often pop in to show them my photos.
One of the best parts of learning film and furthering my photographic abilities was seeing my friend’s creativity come into play. My friends started to come up with ideas for places to shoot photos or certain scenes they wanted to create. One of my friends, Usman, got really into disposables and probably used about six of them throughout the course of a few weeks. He would come over with big ideas for different pictures he wanted to take, and we would work through that together. Taking pictures became such an important part of my daily interactions with my friends that we began to keep cameras on us wherever we went; something that I was always embarrassed to do. Just keeping a camera on me was a great way to capture moments that I can cherish as pictures forever. I know I’m not the first person to be fascinated by this, but nonetheless I am extremely excited every time I get to edit pictures in Lightroom or get an email with scans from Gelatin Labs. In a lot of ways, photography means more to me than creating visually pleasing images. I work to bring authenticity to my pictures and document people in their natural states. If you look at a lot of the pictures in this article, you’ll see more pictures of people, which is something that I haven’t always been comfortable doing. Now, as I get more comfortable with doing that, I enjoy my pictures a lot more than I used to.
Speaking of cherishing pictures, another step I took was giving my pictures more value than an instagram post. Sure, I put some cool pictures out on Instagram, but that’s not really what it’s about for me anymore. This magazine is one way that I got away from that. Another way was printing photo books, mainly as gifts for my family members. I’ve heard a lot of photographers say that there is something special about holding your work in your hand, but I’ve grown up in the digital age so I’ve never really thought that I would be printing my work. People aren’t wrong, though; there is something really special about holding your own work. To be 100% honest, if I printed a photo book that was only occasionally flipped through at family parties, I would still be happy.
Maybe I’m still not a good photographer. I know that I’m not. The best part about a hobby, though, is learning it over a lifetime. I look forward to getting better as I grow older and take pictures of my travels, my time in the Coast Guard, and eventually my kids and family. It’s no secret that video and newer forms of media are taking precedence nowadays, but I urge you to take some time and appreciate some analog photography every once in a while.