Creatively, I’m a bandwagoner; whatever you do is what I wanna do. My dad was a band director when I was a kid, I spent a lot of autumn nights of my single digited years in the bleachers with the pep band as they plowed through “Gimme Some Lovin’” at the volume of a low flying 747. It was no question, then, that when I got to 5th grade I asked to play trumpet so I could blare like the big kids. In high school I found webcomics. Most of them were dweebish and terrible, and at the end of freshman year in 2009 I had a deviantart account filled with dweebish and terrible comics of my very own. My sister shot 35 mm film her senior year of high school so I shot 35mm film. One of my roommates early on in college had a 5 string bass so I learned 5 string bass. Later, I got cooking from Emily, keyboard synthesis from Ryan, and my stupid guitar ideas from Erik. My skills are a history of my relationships.

So now it’s 2025 and my girlfriend picks up photography. A few weeks after she shows me some of her negatives, a Canon S60 digital camera is on its way to my house via USPS. I’ve liked taking “””””artful””””” pics on my phone since I got one, buildings, bugs, friends, machines, night time, snowfall, I spent a summer in 2014 trying to take underwater shots of crawdads when I got a waterproof case for my Motorola V40. [As an aside, the V series was discontinued after I think the V60 and I’m still pissed. Great battery life and a great camera. When my V60 got run over by a car I had to replace it with a Samsung S23 that is worth it’s weight in horse’s shit. If I worked at Foxcon they’d have to fill a Hyundai-sized crater in the parking lot after my funeral. I try not to think this kind of stuff.] However much enjoyment I have from taking phone pics that’s not documentation of holidays, friend and family visits, what the cats are doing, etc., it doesn’t feel like a real creative practice. Where do these pictures go? Who are they for? I have no place for them outside my gallery app so they remain interred like ashes in a mausoleum. Also, generally, I want the phone OUT of my HAND. Getting a little camera just meant for pictures encourages more purposeful photography and a project to let the images loose.

Now: I have it in my hand. So: what do I do with it

Here’s some early answers to that question,

The most exciting image is obviously the portrait in the rear view mirror. To me, the energy of a candid portrait is so much higher than a composed shot of something static. These early shots are largely experiments in seeing what the sensor and lens are capable of. What do colors look like? Pretty good! How low of light can I get away with? Not very without post processing. Do I still have 1/4″ in my hands without a tripod? No.

The bigger question remains, what am I really doing? Digital images are most of what I see every day, why generate more of them? Following the medium, my goal is not to make meaning in single images. Instead, I think what I have to do is shoot enough to find a series that describes some kind of sensation or emotion and present them as parts of a whole.