![\"\"](\"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/leftyphotos15-1-scaled.jpg\")
<\/a>Most 110 cameras were of the style of mine: a rectangular slab that was great for slipping in a jacket pocket. 110 film came in small cartridges with both the film reel and the takeup reel included, and they slotted quickly into the rear of the camera. 110 film is almost exactly the same size as the current 4\/3 digital sensor, at 17x13mm. That size in film is really very small. Since 110 film was also primarily marketed for casual snappers, the film stock used in 110 cartridges was also generally pretty cheap. Combine that with cheap lenses in most of the cameras, and image quality was pretty awful. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, I enjoyed it, and used that camera for taking pictures of random things here and there, and even took it with me on my 8th grade field trip to Washington DC. I think those photos may be floating around in a drawer or cupboard at my parents’ house, but I haven’t seen them in well over a decade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eventually, that camera was either broken or lost, and the fact I don’t remember which should tell you that I wasn’t exactly a shutterbug at that age. For the next few years, I barely took any photos, and when I did, I’d buy a cheap disposable. That changed when I got my first 35mm camera when I was 16. It was a Samsung Maxima Zoom 77i <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Samsung 77i took 35mm film, had a 35-70mm f\/3.5-6.7 lens, and was loaded with features. Of course none of those features included any manual control of aperture, shutter speed, or anything else, but it did have a ton of auto modes, including ‘backlight control’ (which just bumped EC by 1.5 stops) and ‘portrait zoom’ which I assume shot wide open and zoomed it, but I never used it. The only ‘special’ features I used were the bulb mode and the double exposure mode. Looking at an old manual for it, it had a very slow maximum shutter speed of 1\/250s, so I would imagine it shot stopped down a lot. I started taking a lot more photos with that camera, mostly of my friends and family, with the occasional shot on trips and the like. I used that camera from 1994 until I got my first digital camera in 2001. I wasn’t ‘into’ photography at the time. I didn’t think about composition. I didn’t work a scene looking for the best angles, but I enjoyed the act of taking pictures. I took a lot of photos with the 77i, and even framed several when I got the occasional half-decent shot like those below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The shot above of Lake Daisy, was taken in I believe 1998. I remember using the bulb mode on the camera, and experimenting with different shutter speeds. I didn’t own a tripod, so I set the camera on the edge of the dock of the lake and took a few frames. For years, I considered that the best photograph I’d ever taken, and I had it enlarged to 8×12″….which was huge for me at the time. Despite having taken many hundreds to thousands of photos better than that in the decades since, this photo still hangs on the wall in my house today. I still have almost every frame I took with that camera, as I stored them in photo albums – and with film I had prints made of all my shots. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I used the 77i until I graduated from college. By then digital photography was just getting started, and when my parents asked if there was anything that I wanted for a graduation gift, I said I wanted a digital camera…and they obliged. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue: Digital and getting serious about photography<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In the late 1990s and early 2000s, digital photography was starting to take off. I had played with some early digital cameras like the Apple Quicktake 100, and a few Kodak and Casio digital cameras here and there, but I didn’t get my first digital camera until I graduated college – the Kodak DC3400. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The DC3400 was your typical turn of the century digital point and shoot. It was fairly large for a small sensor compact camera. It had a very limited zoom range of 38-76mm equivalent. It had a fairly typical for the day 2.0 megapixel sensor and shot JPEG only. Feature rich it was not. The rear screen was super tiny, it focused slowly and the dynamic range was pretty terrible compared to modern cameras, but it still took fairly decent images. I took to it immediately. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The DC3400 was the first camera I owned where I started caring about the results from a photographic standpoint. I would experiment, trying out different compositions, techniques, and so on. I was limited in a lot of things, as the DC3400 had no manual control at all, but I really enjoyed it. Most of the photos I took with that camera were pretty bad, especially by my current standards, but even by most standards. With that said, as is often the case with new photographers, even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and again, and as I took more and more images, as one would expect, I’d get those occasional good images. None of the images I took with the DC3400 would rank among my top images today, but that camera really began the spark that would grow into my photographic passion. Below is a small sample of some images I took with it, starting with some of my first shots with it, and ending with some of my early images after moving to Europe in 2002. I’m still proud of a few of these images, and the Eiffel Tower shot still hangs in my bedroom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By 2004, I had caught the photography bug. Living in Europe, I had the ability to travel to a huge variety of places and I wanted to capture it all. After deploying for the Iraq war for four months in early 2004, I bought a camera that would finally give me a bit of manual control: The Canon A75. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When I got the A75, I was still trying to convince myself that I didn’t need to spend lots of money on a DSLR and lenses – I was fine with just learning a bit more about the photographic process. The A75 allowed me to do that, as it featured all the standard exposure modes, including full manual and aperture and shutter priority. Given the small digicam sensor, the changing of aperture had limited effect, but it was still a great learning tool. The image quality was also a notable step up from my DC3400, with a 3.2MP sensor and a wider zoom range. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I used the A75 for several trips in 2004, including trips to Amsterdam, a second trip to Paris, and a trip to Salzburg, Austria and a few sites near there in southeast Germany. The A75 was a good little camera, but I found I wanted even more. Below is a sample of images:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I only shot with the A75 as my primary camera for about four months. By then I was hooked on photography and knew I needed to get a proper camera. I continued to use the A75 for a while as a pocket camera, but dove fully into the craft when I got my first DSLR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue: Photography as a passion<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n I’ve spent a lot of time talking about my early days in photography, and I think I’m likely going to speed up. Over the last 15 years, I’ve used a lot of gear, I’ve been a lot of places, I’ve improved a ton in my photography and continued to try to learn, but while the last 17 years of photography make up the vast majority of my output, it’s also just that phase of continuous small improvement. Sure, things have changed, and I’ll discuss that a bit, but by and large, once I made the leap to a proper camera with interchangeable lenses, and really started working, the big leaps stopped and the small changes began. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That phase began at the end of 2004 when I got my first DSLR. It’s a camera that was a lot of photographers’ first DSLR – the Canon Digital Rebel. Why? Well, I could afford it. It was the first DSLR under $1,000, and the image quality was such a huge step up from the small sensor compacts I’d been using that it was a bit of a revelation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I started out with just a Sigma super zoom and the plastic fantastic 50mm f\/1.8 II. Despite the middling glass, it gave me most everything I needed to really start to explore photography in-depth. I was taking photos all the time. Going out on shoots every few days, exploring my local area, taking trips. I had a lot of experiments fall flat. I took quite a lot of poor photos, but slowly and surely, the amount of images I took that I considered to be ‘good’ began to climb. I used the Digital Rebel from 2004 until I upgraded to a 30D in 2006. A lot of the images from that time I look back on and find them to not be up to scratch, but there are also quite a few images that I still count among my very favorite photos. I’ve presented a selection from that time period below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n After those first few years with my Digital Rebel, I started to feel like I actually knew a bit about the craft of photography. I continued to learn. I continued to go out and shoot, and try new techniques, new genres, new things. Some things have failed spectacularly, and some worked. I founded this site in 2012, which seems crazy to me, as that is now closer to the beginning of my real photography journey than to now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Like many photographers, I have periods of time where I get in a creativity rut, and I feel like I’m taking the same images over and over. Sometimes that lasts a short while, and other times it can last a year or two. I just keep shooting, and eventually I’ll snag some of those images that make the work and the effort worthwhile. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue: Keep on Shooting<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n My kit has changed a lot over the years. After the Digital Rebel, I shot with a Canon 30D and later a 1Ds Mark II before moving to mirrorless. That train began first with Micro 4\/3, then I transitioned to Fujifilm and later to Sony, before ending back where I started with Canon and the R5 and R6. If you’re curious about my current kit, below is most of what I use on a regular basis:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, I’ll leave you with a smattering of work as I’ve grown as a photographer. Of course, many of my images from 2012 and beyond are found on this site, in reviews and other articles. A much more comprehensive gallery of my work over the years can be found at my portfolio site http:\/\/www.jsteelephotos.com<\/a>. Below, I’ve assembled some samples of my work from 2008 on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, that’s enough for now. If you’ve stayed with me this long, thanks for going down this journey with me. Remember to keep shooting and keep looking for new things along the way!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ll be up front: I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing this article. Part of is the wish to convey the simple fact that developing a skill takes time, practice, experience, and maybe a little talent, but significantly more of the first three. The other reason to write this is simply nostalgia. I started thinking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-shop"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/tivoli_gardens.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p28RGq-2NV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10783"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13006,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10783\/revisions\/13006"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/admiringlight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced that camera, and no images of it are rights free, though a quick google image search of it will bring up plenty of images of it.<\/s> Edit 9\/29\/24: I have found my Samsung 77i deep in a junk drawer…and so was able to add the image above!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>Getting Started with Digital<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>Photography as a passion<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>Keep on Shooting<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>