I’m an amateur photographer living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Since I was a kid I’ve been interested in playing with cameras and taking pictures although I didn’t get serious about photography until the last few years.

My Dad had been a photographer in the Navy and kept it up as a hobby after he returned to civilian life.   The first camera I can remember using was my Dad’s Kodak Brownie box camera. Like all Kodaks, it was easy to use. Load a roll of 120 film, advance to the first frame, point the camera at something, and press the shutter button.  Of course you couldn’t see the picture right away. You had to finish the whole roll and then take it to the store which sent it out for developing. A week later you received back the negatives and prints. I did not get to shoot many photos in those years; my allowance didn’t stretch that far.

I don’t recall what happened to that old Kodak Brownie.  A succession of other Kodaks took its place in our family, none of which stand out in my memory the way that box camera did.  Kodak Brownies are collector items today, if you can find one in working condition. Someday I want to get one, just for sentimental reasons.

When I was a kid my father even had a darkroom set up in the basement.  But serving as a Lutheran minister and raising six kids took so much of his time that there was little left for photography.  Eventually He sold his cameras and darkroom equipment, before I was old enough to learn how to use them.

At college in the late 1970′s, some of my friends were getting into 35mm SLR cameras and the Canon AE-1 was a popular choice.  After college, and about the time I got married, I purchased a Pentax ME Super with a 50mm f1.7 lens.  The Pentax was Aperture Priority auto exposure, or you could Manual Exposure. In that era everything was
manual focus, too.  Later I added a Takumar 28-80mm zoom lens made by (or for) Pentax.

Why did I choose Pentax over the big two: Canon and Nikon? The ME Super was well regarded in its day, and was more compact than some of its competition.  Maybe I wanted to cheer for the underdog.

Although I understood the basics about Aperture, Shutter speed, and the rule of thirds, in those years I mostly used my SLR as if it were a point and shoot camera.  A few photos from those years are special to me but the majority could have been taken with any garden variety Kodak Instamatic.  I didn’t know enough to exploit the creative capabilities of an SLR.  I would shoot wide open because I could, not because I had good reason to do so.  My shoe mount flash was straight ahead only, with no capability to tilt the head for bounce flash.  Film choices were mostly: 100 or 400 ASA Kodak color print film, and once in a great while, black and white or Kodachrome.

The demands of work and family consumed most of my time.  Years passed. I turned 40 and to come to grips with the fact that I still didn’t have a red sports car in the driveway.  My wife saw a silver haired gentleman in his convertible and joked that I’d be that old before I got mine.  At 50 something, what hair I have left is turning silver.  I am thinking that perhaps my budget will never stretch to buy that dream car, but it did stretch far enough to get me back into photography.

First I needed a modern camera.  So in 2004 I bought a Nikon N75 35mm film SLR with the 28-80 kit lens. The N75 was a compact SLR that was Auto-Everything where my old Pentax had been mostly-manual.  In 2004, Nikon had alread introduced several digital SLR’s: the D1, D100 and D70.  While I was purchasing my film SLR the camera salesman opined that it wasn’t “If” but “When” I would change from film to digital.  He was right.  Three years later my wife bought me a D50 for Christmas.

Since the purchase of that modern N75, I slowly learned how to become a better photographer.  I’ve learned a lot in that time but there is still a library’s worth of stuff I need to learn.

I intend this blog is going to be an online journal in which I will write about what I’m learning in photography. If you are a pro or advanced amateur I hope you won’t laugh too hard at my mistakes.  If you are new to photography, perhaps I can help you avoid a few of the many photo failures for which I am responsible.

Tim Kant