Many years back, I made up a word: kameraspielen. It’s German, and like many words in that language, it’s just a mish-mash of two words that means something new. In this case, kamera is (unsurprisingly) “camera” and spielen is “to play”. This is me, playing with my camera, learning to be better.
You see, photography is my hobby. Well, it’s one of my hobbies, anyway. I’ve been working at it for many years, and I recognize that I still have a long way to go before I call myself a photographer. I’ve been on a dozen or more backpacking trips with my brother Thom, who’s an outstanding photographer, and I’ve literally stood beside him and taken a photo of the same landscape. Yet somehow his pictures are invariably better. More creative, more impressive, more grand. I don’t know how he does it, but I aspire to get there someday.
And so I continue pulling out my amazing Canon 5D and snapping pictures whenever the mood strikes. Then I download the shots and play around with them in Darktable, looking for ways to somehow make them better. More creative, more impressive, more grand.
Like my writing (another hobby of mine), I can look back through the archives and see the evolution of my photography. From grainy low-resolution shots on an old Sony Mavica, to crisp landscapes and creative use of focal length, it’s fun to see how my technique and my editing have changed. Some years ago, Thom gave me a great book: Camera and Craft. It’s packed full of suggestions, ideas, examples, and great explanations of why you want to fiddle with this knob or that one, why you want to use this lens for that shot, and so on. I absorbed it all. However, I’ve found that just knowing the technique doesn’t necessarily make me a better photographer. But it helps. Every little bit helps.
As I’ve looked through those old photos, laughing at some and cringing at others, I thought it might be fun to collect them somewhere. The good, the bad, the creative, the cringe-worthy. Thus this site was born.
So here I am, three decades after my first Pentax SLR, doing some kameraspielen and striving to one day become a photographer.