I Quit! The End Of An Era

Well, I did it, I quit! I’ve sold my last pro digital camera and lenses and gear, with no intention of ever buying another dSLR. So why have I quit photography? Why have I abandoned the art and craft I have spent a lifetime immersing myself in since high school? Truth be told I quit desiring to be creative with traditional cameras. My long journey in photography began in high school with a borrowed camera from the school to do my assignments in the photography class. 
 

Back then it was a Yaschica-mat 124G twin-lens reflex camera that hundreds of students over the years used. It was well worn and had a frayed leather case it was in with a neck strap. 
 

The cool thing about the camera was its waist-level viewfinder with a popup magnifier to help you focus the lens. Carried around your waist rather than bringing the camera up to your eye to see your subject allowed for shooting below eye-level which made for more interesting images, especially of people. Think of the street portraits of Vivian Maier who used a similar style camera. 
 

Because of this, I always looked at the camera not as some precious, beautiful  object, but more of a “Cracker Jack Box” with a prize inside, that prize being the roll of film inside after it was fully exposed. That film was the real precious thing to me, not the camera. 
 

Once I had enough money, I bought my first camera with an interchangeable lens, a 35mm Pentax K-1000 with a 50mm lens. This led me to experiment with films not available for the Yaschica’s medium format, such as Kodak Hi-Speed Black & White Infrared film, and 35mm slide films. Those days in the high school darkroom developing film and making prints and just experimenting my little heart out were the best of days immersed in the love of photography. 
 

When I went to Art School and entered the Commercial Photography program, it was time to move up to a professional “Big-Boy” camera and get a 4x5 Large-format camera. This camera lasted my entire professional career, and helped me create some of my most creative, compelling images. It was also the “dumbest” camera I had ever owned. By that I mean it consisted of a lens(interchangeable), a folding”box” body to keep light out, and a focusing screen at the back. No electronics, no automatic anything, just a “camera obscura” type of device that relied on the photographer to do all the work. 
 

Fact is I was weened on all manual cameras from the beginning,so I was always used to working in manual mode. I didn’t get a camera with auto features until the digital age, and even then I would set my cameras to manual mode. I just like making all the decisions and thinking creatively about my camera. 
 

My very first toe-dip into owning an all digital camera was a little “candy bar” style 5mp Canon Powershot with a sliding lens cover. It was my way to see how much a digital camera could capture something interesting to me and how different working and thinking digitally was. With analog film on the way out, and the sad closing of professional film labs, it was essential that to continue creating photographs, one had to have a serious digital camera. I had a series of Canon dSLR cameras and lenses that became my staples for years before I switched to the Panasonic LUMIX camera as I was becoming more and more interested in video, which the Panasonic excelled in. 
 

But after all that, I found myself less and less interested in pulling out a dSLR-style camera, putting on and changing out lenses, photographing images to a CF or SD card, putting that card into a card-reader, uploading the images to a computer, then post-processing the images in one program or another. It all felt so archaic, which is a helluva’ thing to say from someone born in the analog film era. So since I have let go of my last dSLR gear, with no intention to ever get another, what will I do? Am I quitting and giving up on photography? Retiring from creating images to go fishing or take up some obscure hobby? Not on your Nelly! I have a plan: 

Enter the iPhone. I have been photographing with an iPhone since 2009. That’s the year when two things converged: I got my very first iPhone, a 3Gs as a birthday present, and Chase Jarvis came out with “The Best Camera” app. That year I created my first 365 Project on Tumblr, photographing, processing and uploading one image everyday for a whole year. That can really challenge your creativity to have to make an image everyday! And I’m not one to simply click the shutter, add some contrast and saturation, upload and call it a day. No, I had to explore the limits of my creative imagination and create new, compelling images with a variety of apps, and often trying to out-do myself every day. It was a big challenge, but I managed to pull it off, and no sooner did I complete that, then I immediately started on a second 365 project, this time limiting myself to only photographing trees. I only made it half way through that project before I simply burned out. 
 

All that said, over the years I’ve made my most creative images with an iPhone, and feeling how laborious it is to photograph with a dSLR, I find the process of working within the mobile workflow to be far more pleasant and above all more creative. So I’m only “quitting” the use of big cameras for a leaner, more streamlined way creating artistic images that brings the joy back that was so long missing from my older traditional cameras. It truly is the end of an era!