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When much younger I traveled to Mexico, Canada, England, Pakistan, and India but took no pictures because, I told myself, I wanted to enjoy the purity of the experience, undistracted by concern over recording just the right Kodak moment. What this idealism really masked was a combination of technophobia and a lack of facility with multi-tasking. I was definitely not good with cameras. In those days they required the swift mental juggling of such issues as F-stops, light meters, attachable zoom lenses, color wash, under-, over- or double-exposure, camera steadiness, and so on.
Eventually, of course, instamatics appeared and then even 35mm point-and-shoot cameras.
Remember when they held a 24-hour photo-fest with about 100 point-and-shoot cameras given out to complete amateurs more or less at random all over the country (A Day in the Life of America [1986])? The great thing, and particularly encouraging for me, was that a lot of the resulting pictures turned out to be really good.
Then I was further impressed when a five-year-old nephew got his first camera and began taking terrific shots, innocent, well composed, fresh, simple, and spontaneous.
From such naive photography examples, I have found inspiration for pursuing my own primitive efforts.
I do not claim to see with the eyes of a child when I click the shutter these days, but, on the other hand, I am not so self-critical either. I am grateful for the new developments in cameras. Now I just take photos that feel right to me, lots and lots of them, and pick out those that seem worth keeping.
These days I usually take my camera with me and find that photography, far from detracting, deepens and enriches the experience.
Beginning in 1989 and continuing until quite recently, I have used the Fuji 35mm TW300 film camera. I am now getting acquainted with a new one, the Pentax Optio 750Z digital camera.
The pictures so far fall naturally into several primary categories: a trip to Yellowstone; Oregon photos; Colorado images; Enchanted Rock; California; etc.
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