For the life of me I have no idea why cameras and photography have held sway over me for so much of my life.  As long ago as the age of 8 ( I’m now 43 as of 2008 ) I was fascinated by cameras and would frequently seek them out when I was with my parents at any store that had them in stock.  I still distinctly remember looking over the various SLR models from Minolta, Pentax, Canon, Nikon, Olympus, etc.  I would collect brochures from the sales clerk or counter, take them home, and devour them with total abandon whenever I could.

From those very early days of my youthful lust for photographic equipment I no longer recall specific model names or numbers (update: I DO remember a model with which I was smitten; the Minolta XG-7. It just popped into my head this evening!), but I do recall my first true love of the SLR kingdom:  the 35mm Minolta X700.  Released in about 1981 (when I was a young lad of 16), it had the brightest viewfinder by far compared to the competition.  It was loaded with ability.  And it made the most remarkable sounds when the shutter button was depressed thus releasing the mirror to move up, the shutter curtain to snap open, then closed, and the mirror dropping back down into place.  Even the film advance lever, which was large and purposeful looking, made the most glorious noise when engaged to advance the film to the next frame.  I was in love.  But I didn’t grow up in a world where parents purchased for their 16-year old children a multi-hundreds of dollars SLR camera.  I would have to worship my love from afar.

My very first camera was a Polaroid instamatic thing.  It was okay, but it was rather costly to operate.  The packs of film weren’t cheap and the pictures often came out too dark unless you were taking pictures outside in full sun.  But sometime not long after graduating from high school I purchased my first SLR.  It was an entry-level Minolta, whose model number is long forgotten, but it was mine!  While purchasing and devloping film wasn’t exactly inexpensive, it wasn’t any worse than the Polaroid, but it took far superior photographs!  While never having taken a course in photography (or having read a book about it for that matter) I played with my camera an awful lot.  I knew and learned just enough to take decent photos, but nothing more really.  But that wasn’t imporant.  Oddly enough, even then I was more enamored with the process of taking the picture (working with the camera, scoping the subject matter, etc.) than I was anything else.  I enjoyed photography for the sake of taking pictures.  The end result, the processed photograph, was almost an afterthought of sorts.

Over the years I purchased another couple of film-based SLR cameras with the final purchase being a Nikon N65 (a pretty basic 35mm SLR) for the purpose of taking pictures at my sister’s wedding (I was the ‘official’ photographer).  The purchase of the N65 was made with a certain amount of hesitation because this was about the same time that digital cameras were finally becoming a bit more well known in the consumer mind-set.  They weren’t as common as they are today, by any stretch, but they were known enough that I briefly considered the notion of going digital.  However, the reasons for not doing so were rather strong:  prices were still rather high, image quality was still rather mediocre, and pixel count was pretty low so enlargements would have been problematic.

But here I am today.  All these years later our house has become filled with four digital point-n-shoots and one digital SLR; my Canon 40D.  It is a brave new world this digital photography stuff and I can safely say I have no intention of going back.  Film photography seems almost as ancient as flint axes; useful, but rubbish compared to modern alternatives.

So, now that you know a bit of how I got to be here, why exactly am I here?  The idea for this group project first came to me after I had been involved for a few months with the exchange of comments and e-mails with some of the other founding members of this group.  I wanted to do something different and while a group project isn’t new, it is for us.  I wanted to see us try and shoot for something instead of simply shooting at something.  I want to see how we each interpret a given topic/subject.  I want to grow as a photographer and grow with these people, all of whom are very fine and wonderful.

It’s really a pretty straightforward matter.  Nothing grandiose or over the top.   Just a chance to have some fun, but fun with a purpose.  Yeah, that’s it.  Fun with a purpose.