Just Keep Shooting

My first camera was a 110 film camera when I was about twelve years old. Nothing particularly sophisticated. I photographed my friends, our adventures and whatever else happened to catch my attention.

Years later, I picked up a Minolta SRT-201 and fell in love with photography all over again. In the early 2000s, while studying Visual Communication at Collins College in Arizona, photography became part of my education as well as something I simply loved doing.

Then life did what life does.

Family, work and responsibilities took center stage, and photography slowly moved into the background. It never completely went away, though.

Years later, of all things, my daughters brought me back to it.

They wanted to start a YouTube channel. I found myself helping them choose cameras, learning about GoPros, setting things up and figuring out editing. Somewhere in the process of helping them discover something new, I rediscovered something old.

Photography.

I started pulling out books, refreshing skills I'd forgotten and learning everything that had changed. And one piece of advice kept appearing everywhere I looked:

Just keep shooting.

So I did.

What began as rediscovering an old passion eventually became my profession. Since then I've photographed portraits and headshots, events, businesses, properties, products and plenty of people who began by telling me they weren't comfortable in front of a camera.

More than twenty-five years after picking up that little 110 camera, I'm still fascinated by the same basic thing: finding something interesting, pointing a camera at it and figuring out how I want someone else to see it.

Apparently, “just keep shooting” turned out to be pretty good advice.