I got my first camera when I was 14. Fifty years have passed, but the memories are still clear as glass.
It was a Nikkormat FT3, an entirely mechanical, manual camera, and it was bliss. It had a built-in light meter, everything was solid, and setting the rings where they belonged sometimes required a little muscle.
I feel fortunate to have grown up in an analogue world, and to have spent days and weeks in the darkroom, watching the quiet magic of images slowly appearing before my eyes.
Since then, I have had a few other cameras—not as many as some of my friends, but enough. My first digital camera was a Nikon D3s, and today I am very happy with my Z7.
Photography itself, however, has come and gone throughout my life. There have been long periods when I hardly picked up a camera at all. And I have always had a slightly complicated relationship with looking through a lens when something beautiful and transient was unfolding in front of me. Sometimes it felt more important simply to be there, to see it with my own eyes. The consequence, of course, is that I have watched more than a few potential poster images disappear into memory.
Over the years, my photographs have also ended up scattered all over the place, which in this supposedly convenient digital age has proved remarkably frustrating.
But now, as I find myself becoming an Elder, something curious has happened. The world seems to be moving faster and faster, at an increasingly frantic pace, and yet time itself has, in some mysterious way, begun to slow down. And with that, I have found time to enjoy photography again—more than I have for a very long time.
The occasions when I can take my camera into nature with no deadline, no destination and no need to be anywhere else are still far too few. But perhaps that is why I treasure them more now.
Out there, time slows down.
These are some of the images I have brought home from those moments. I hope you enjoy them too.