Lockdown began in California on St. Patrick’s Day, 2020. I remember
that line in the sand.
Photography had been a hobby fitted around whatever time remained. I
wanted to understand it beyond automatic settings and snapshots.
Suddenly, for reasons nobody would have chosen, I had time.
I had bought a Nikon J1 for a trip, with its kit lens and the
30–110mm telephoto. It was enough to learn on and eventually became the
camera that stayed in my bag. I had also inherited my dad’s camera gear.
Old and new, all of it went to work. His 58mm Minolta lens, adapted to a
Sony digital body, is still one of my favorites.
For months, I cooked and photographed.
The dining-room studio
I became convinced that I was destined to photograph food and drinks.
My studio was a worn dining-room table, a borrowed constant light with a
softbox, and whatever objects I could find around the house.
My grandparents had been antique dealers, so props were not a
problem. The table was dark and worn, with wood grain that worked
perfectly for the style I was beginning to discover.
For what I had, what I knew, and what I was learning, I am not
embarrassed by the work. It came from a period of uncertainty when
keeping busy felt necessary.
Breakthroughs happened almost daily. One of the biggest was realizing
that my visual instinct leaned dark and moody.
YouTube became my university. The long-form B&H and Adorama
presentations were especially useful. Some ran for hours, but they
treated photography as a craft rather than a list of camera
settings.
I already leaned toward open-source tools in technology. Photography
on a budget felt like an extension of the same philosophy: understand
the equipment, use what is available, and avoid confusing price with
knowledge.
Learning to see mistakes
An online photography contest that functioned more like a game taught
me how to evaluate an image.
Composition, lighting, and exposure were the obvious lessons. The
smaller details were more important:
- Catchlights in a person’s eyes
- Distracting reflections
- The edge of a prop entering the frame
- Depth of field that did not support the subject
- Highlights that looked acceptable on the camera but failed
later
My earliest habit was shooting everything wide open. Like many
beginners, I chased bokeh and sacrificed otherwise good photographs to
an unnecessarily thin plane of focus.
I still like bokeh. I just no longer assume that the widest aperture
is the most photographic choice.
The larger lesson was less technical: there is no substitute for
practice. Photograph everything, review it honestly, and return to the
same problem with one more piece of understanding.
From control to chaos
When I needed to get outside, I practiced macro photography.
Honey bees became a favorite subject, though they were not
cooperative models. Flowers, spiders, wasps, moss, and anything else
small enough to be overlooked became fair game.
Macro work created a bridge between two different kinds of
photography.
Still life offered control. I could move a light, turn a glass,
change the background, and try again.
Insects introduced unpredictability. Focus, movement, light, and
timing had to come together before the subject disappeared.
That was an early rehearsal for event photography, where nearly
everything that matters happens once.
What I remember now
I miss the unclaimed time. I do not miss the fear.
I remember elderly people at the grocery store who had no choice but
to be there. I remember anger around masks, uncertainty about what came
next, and the sense that ordinary interactions had become dangerous.
Photography did not make that period good. It gave me a way to pay
attention while moving through it.
It also changed the direction of my life. The dining-room experiments
led to better control of light. Vintage lenses taught me to slow down
and use focus peaking. Macro photography taught patience. All of it made
the transition into live events less abrupt than it otherwise would have
been.
If I could speak to myself at that table, I would not offer a better
equipment list or a shortcut.
I would say: use the time. Keep making photographs. The work does not
need to know what it will become yet.