SKAGGS Blog

Steel Grate

Since I was a youngster, I’ve always had a passion for photography. I was obsessed with it when I was in High School to the point that I talked my Dad into letting me build a darkroom in the basement of his office building. I spent hours down there trying everything possible with an enlarger and photographic paper. I even got to the point of developing color negatives and doing color prints. That was time consuming and very difficult. If I wasn’t down “in the hole” as it was said, I was out shooting, shooting and shooting.

Then, I graduated, got accepted into architecture school and there wasn’t a lot of time to shoot and forget about spending hours in the darkroom. If I had a free hour that I wasn’t in my studio I was either sleeping or at a bar. Suffice to say, while I didn’t loose my passion for shooting, I didn’t have enough time to do it. Skip ahead several years and I found myself looking for a form of self expression outside of SKAGGS. I thought long and hard about what I should do. Should I start cooking? Try to paint? Sculpt? I wasn’t sure.

Then one day this past Spring, I was headed to the Princeton Club in NYC and I walked by The International Center of Photography. Well, I didn’t exactly walk by, rather I found myself staring at this beautify photograph in the window and that is when it hit me - I needed to pick up a camera again. A lot of things have changed since the days of my trusty, built like a rock, Nikon FE and F3 and rolls and rolls of Ilford 400. I began to walk slowly again on down the street to my meeting but all I could think about was shooting. I realized just in that last block how many amazing things were going on around me and how many were just wanting to be caught on film.

The next time I went by there, I went in an picked up some information on classes. I had decided it was time to shoot and so I enrolled in a one week, intensive class just to get my head back into again. Wow, what a blast! Each night we would meet from 6-10pm and discuss all aspects of photography, camera operation, basic principles, and we’d be given an assignment and we’d go out and shoot for an hour.

The assignments weren’t difficult but they were a bit challenging. For example go out and find a subject that was romantic, dangerous, melancholy or mysterious and shoot at least 20 pictures. Being next to Bryant Park in the Summer, romance was everywhere, however, I wasn’t keen on going up to couples kissing and sticking my camera in their face. I guess it’s just not me. There were some people in the class who did, or better, tried and well, you can probably guess what happened. I chose mysterious as the sun was starting to set, the sky was turning a dark blue and the shadows were growing bigger and darker.

We would do exercises like this all week and on the last evening, we took our favorite top pictures and printed them out, hung them on the wall and looked at what everyone had produced. It was really amazing to see how it such a short time, everyone had taken some really great shots. I was happy with 2 of mine and there are a couple of other ones that are OK as well, but mostly I’m glad I picked up the camera and started shooting again. It feels great and it’s been just the thing I needed!

And the moral of the story you might be asking? If you want to do something, then do it. You have but one life, so follow your dreams. You’ll be happy you did.

Bryant Park Chairs

Man on Platform

The Window

White Light

Clark Street

Fly on a Flower