My favorite hobby is photography. For years after using a camera to take photographs I didn't consider myself to be a "photographer." I thought that Ansel Adams was a photographer and that made me something else. What that was, I wasn't sure, but it wasn't a "photographer." Then some years ago I read, "A photographer is someone who takes photographs with a camera." It was then that I realized that I was, in fact, a photographer. That statement gave me permission to enjoy my hobby to its fullest.
Over the years of taking pictures I've had several significant breakthroughs. The most significant was when two days before my birthday in June of 1982 I read these words in the manual of my brand new Minolta X-GM. I read, "If you open your aperture one stop and speed up your shutter speed one stop, it's the same exposure." When I read the sentence the photo muses inside my head sang, "This is important. You need to understand this." I didn't understand it, so I read it again. I read it several times until the light of revelation flashed in my brain. Understanding that sentence changed everything about using a 35mm SLR. My adventure into serious photography took a giant leap forward. The second biggest breakthrough happened several years later in a camera shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I was frustrated with my lack of progress using my first digital camera. The sales associate knew I was good with my film camera. He held a 35mm film camera in one hand and a digital SLR in the other. He said, "the only difference between your film camera and the digital camera is this", and with the flick of a finger he popped the memory card of the digital camera out into his hand. Without saying a word, those photo muses sang again.
I am very critical of my own work. I'm critical in a literary sense of seeing the value of what I do, but being keenly aware of the flaws. Until recent years it has been difficult for me to enjoy all the good parts and mostly see the the "needs improvement" parts. But with age and experience, I'm doing much better.
An enlargement of a photograph exposes everything. That's one reason that I can count on a few fingers of one hand the number of enlargements of my own photography that I have purchased. I don't use Photoshop so the images that I capture and the pictures that I print come right from the camera. I use software that enhances the color saturation, but other than that the images are in their natural state. I recently took my camera to downtown Chattanooga and took several hundred images and posted a few on Facebook. A friend of mine wanted one of them, a nighttime photo of the Walnut Street Bridge, enlarged for her office at Dalton State College. She wanted a 20x24. As a test I ordered an 8x10. It looked horrible. Not just me, but my wife agreed that it looked really bad. Not to be defeated, I decided to go back downtown and take it again. I took several hundred more photos and posted four or five on Facebook. The positive reaction to the images was overwhelming. Several asked if they could use one of the photos. All of my images are public domain so I said, "Sure. Help yourself." But the image I was looking for was of that bridge. When I got home and processed them, there was one in particular that I thought was very good. This time, instead of the trial, I just ordered the 20x24. The packaged arrived just two days ago. As my wife helped me carefully remove the print from the packaging, I was rather nervous and held my breath. The photo is outstanding. By my own critical and rigid standards, it's beautiful. In advance I can see it framed, hanging on her wall for all the world to see. And for me to see my own work. The capture of the beautiful nighttime bridge was possible because of one thing, "If you open your aperture by one stop and speed up the shutter speed one stop, it's the same exposure".
And finally my analogy, my life application. As we get older, it's more and more difficult to not see the flaws of the years we've left behind us. It's so easy to feel the discomfort and even pain of our mistakes instead of seeing the beauty of the good things we've created. And maybe we are a little afraid that what those evangelists told us is true. There will be a screen of drive-in theater proportions and on that screen will be played "the story of your life." That big screen will expose every flaw, every sin, every mistake and you will be judged by those sins. You will be embarrassed and humiliated in front of all the saints. Just like when I opened that package and saw nothing but my beautiful bridge, if there is a movie of my life on an IMAX screen, it's going to be called, "This is Your Life. A Life of Incredible Love and Beauty." And God's going to hold up a memory card of all my mistakes in His left hand and a memory card of all of my beautiful creations in the right. And with a wry smile and a second's hesitation he's going to cast that card in his left hand into the fiery furnace and say, "Well done good and faithful servant, enter into Paradise.". And with great anticipation, my Canon camera and I will walk through those Pearly Gates. And then I'll remember something else very important that I read in a photography magazine,, "Photography is nothing more than controlling light." "And there was light. And it was very good."
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