For a long, long time I’ve always loved photographs and way back in 1996 I got my first 35mm film camera that I used on a 3 week trip to South Korea and Japan.  I always felt dealing with film was not only inconvenient but expensive since you were developing entire rolls of film and finding you only liked a fraction of the resulting photos.

In 1998, I saw a photography exhibit while walking about downtown Vancouver.  The exhibit itself was unremarkable, and quite frankly, I don’t even remember the photographer.  However, what did strike me was how some of the photographs were able to capture a moment, and even shape the way you perceived it.  The photography seed was planted.

Over the next few years, digital cameras were taking the consumer market by storm, but being a starving college student, I was never able to get my hands on one.  The promises of a digital viewfinder and no forced photo-finishing costs sounded like a dream come true!

In 2000, I was shocked when I got an Olympus 3030Z as graduation gift from my parents.  This camera was just plain bad-ass with it’s 3.3 MP sensor and promises of producing stunning photos.  Back then I didn’t know much about taking photographs at all, other than I knew I wanted to shoot photos all the time. 

Admittedly, my photos back then weren’t all that great. The harsh reality was that the camera I had was great, but the photographer was terrible. I was shooting pretty much blindly with no real training or knowledge about light, composition or even how to use my own camera.

Along the way, I managed to develop a better eye for photography but was still shooting a ton of bad photos.  I was snapping off some good ones occassionally, but they were nothing to write home about.  I started to read some books and references online and coupled that with buying a Canon S200 which was a smaller camera.  Yup, a smaller one.  My Olympus 3030Z was just too big of a camera and it was never around when I really wanted to take a photo.  The tradeoff, of course, was that my new Canon camera has absolutely no manual controls, had a lower resolution and the flash was piss poor to say the least.  But the fact that I always had this camera with my in my pocket allowed me to take some really great photos because of the moments I was able to capture with it.

As digital cameras got cheaper, I upgraded my camera a few times within the Canon digital elph series.  The sensors were getting far better over time and resolutions were increasing from the paltry 2MP on the S200.   Sometime in 2004, I made the jump into more serious photography by buying a used Canon 300D (aka Digital Rebel);  this is when my photography bug really got serious.   I read more and more, and took countless photos to try to improve my technique.  Along the way, I went through a bunch of different lenses as I discovered what type of shooting I really liked.

I realized that I had a strong preference for photos shot in low light and of people.  I’m not particularly keen on posed photographs; in fact, I pretty must detest them. What I do love, is candid photography or playing with perspective.  This ties back to my love of using the lens to capture moments and the resulting memories that ensure.

For the last year, I have been increasing the size of my portfolio, reading more, and learning more about post-processing in Photoshop.  Along the way, I settled on 3 Canon lenses that I absolutely love — the 50/f1.4, 17-55/f2.8 IS and the 28-135 IS.  I’ve done a decent amount of traveling both for work and personal, which has given me a tremendous opportunity to take photos in places like London, India and even the Czech Republic.

I’m still a long ways away from getting to my goal of expertise, but I’m light years ahead of where I was 10 years ago.  I’d like to think the photos I now have in my portfolio are good enough such that people would want to hang them on their walls. 

Part of my goal setting for this year, I vowed to sell 1 photograph by the end of this year to someone I did not know. While I’d be happy to sell my photos to people I do know (ahem), there is something meaningful to me about a complete stranger liking my work so much that they’d pay for it.

In order to try to achieve that goal, I started an online portfolio built on top of SmugMug.  While I love Flickr, it’s not a service I can use to really try to market and sell my photographs.  SmugMug has some great features, including the ability to completely customize the UI and set my own pricing for my photographs. 

I would love for you all to check out my portfolio, let me know what you think, and even buy something if you like my work.  My portfolio can be found at http://www.twenty01photo.com. Even pass along my portfolio website to someone else I don’t know, and maybe I can achieve my year-end goal early!

Maybe one day I can achieve my longer term goal of having my own photography exhibit?