Photography: how it all started ...

A few people asked me recently how/why I started in photography, tango or motorcycles, so I figured it would be fun to write about that, given the subtitle of my blog ...

This post is about Photography, I will write about motorcycles and tango in other posts.

It was the spring of 2000 and I was looking for a job as the company I was working for was ... "taking water" and was very likely to go under (which it did, shortly after I left). I knew it was likely I was going to leave Florida and I wanted to experience some "tropical" fun while I was still there.

I took a week of and headed to the "Keys", the long sable of islands connected by RT1/US1, that goes all the way to Key West, the home of "Mile 0" on RT-1/US1. The second day I was there I decided to try "Coral reef diving". It's a full day venture, first you get a crash course in diving in a pool, then you get on a boat, head to a coral reef and spend an hour or so under water. It was quite exhilarating to see a shark 20 feet away ... (it was one of the small sharks, not known to attack people), but ... I learned that AFTER I saw it ...

Anyway, before I got to the boat, I went ahead and purchased two of those one time use underwater cameras. When I was growing up I saw countless episodes of the Jacques-Yves Cousteau underwater documentaries and was looking forward to take pictures of that amazing colorful underwater life. Can you spell "naive"?

So, I did, take many pictures while diving, if I remember correctly I used two rolls of film (for the younger crowd, film is something that was used in cameras before the time of digital...), 36 pictures on each roll. As a person with no special interest in photography, taking 70 pictures in one hour was virtually unheard off (Of course, now I have cards that hold 207 hi-res pictures, I have 6 cards and I still have to take my laptop with me to unload the pictures if I go for more then one day trip...)

So, I have a blast during the dive, got a little sick on the boat ride back and rushed to the "one hour" lab to get the pictures developed. I paced in front of the store until they were ready and I opened the envelope expecting to find those amazing colorful shots that you see in magazines (in retrospect that sounds really silly). What I got instead was a bunch of blurry, grainy, blue tinted pictures, on 75% of them not even been able to tell what the hell I was looking at. To say I was disappointed was the understatement of the year. I went back to the store and showed them the pictures and they looked at me and said something along the lines of "uhh, what exactly were you expecting out of a fleshless $8 camera?" ...

Hmm, well, determined to get some better pictures on my next "adventure" which was snorkeling in the coral reef, I went to the local camera store and rented an underwater camera. That was a $200 camera (to me that seemed a huge amount of money to pay for a camera, now my cheapest lens cost me 3 times that much...) so it had to be great, right? Well, while snorkeling in the coral reef is something everyone should try in their lifetime (unlike diving where you can hurt your ears if you're doing it wrong, not to mention decompression side effects if not done properly, snorkeling is pretty safe), the pictures came out just as crappy (well, a bit better, but not by much).

I went back to the camera store and complained about the camera being defective or something. It was then, when the guy in the store (I think he was the owner and a photographer himself) looked at me for a bit, picked up a book from behind the counter, opened it to a specific spot and invited me to sit down on a sofa he had in the store and read. It was a chapter on underwater photography. After reading that chapter I found another one that was interesting, and then another. I ended up spending a few hours in the store going over the entire book. When I got back home I bought a similar book, then another. Then I made my first "big" purchase, I got a N80 Nikon SLR and from there on ... well, that was the beginning.

I never got the chance to take pictures underwater since, but I have no doubt it will happen again someday.

The guy could've said "The camera is fine, to take really good pictures underwater one needs thousand dollars worth of equipment", and if he did, my interest in photography would've never been initiated. Is there a moral to this story? I think so, but I'll let you find it.