photoddgrapher

[photoddgrapher]

[photoddgrapher]

Ahoy Mateys!

I am brand new to this platform. I just signed up because I recently started following a Youtube Channel called Photo Assignments. That group started about 3 years ago and I am just starting out today. In the introduction of the Photography Assignments Channel, Ted Forbes (The Art of Photography) suggested that we sign up for a Tumblr account. So being a good student, I decided to follow his lead.

I am a sailor and I enjoy taking photos. My wife Jojo paddles Hawaiian outrigger canoes and our dog Lulu is starting her own blog and that is why you’re going to be witness to a mish-mash of all kinds of stuff in this Tumblr blog. I also author a few other blogs, so I will be treating this space as my laboratory, testing ground and/or staging area until I am comfortable enough with the platform to actually publish a blog with it.

I’ll give you a little background about my photography. I have been taking pictures since I was 5 or 6 years old. I remember my very first camera, a Kodak Brownie that my father gave me. I would shoot black and white photos while traveling with the family every summer throughout my childhood. From then on I recall going through a series of Kodak Pocket Instamatic cameras that took those super easy-to-use 110 film cartridges. It wasn’t until I got into High School when I would own my first 35mm SLR Camera (again a gift from my parents).

That 1st SLR was the infamous Pentax K-1000. Boy, that camera sure did make me feel like a grown-up. I was so stoked to have finally made it to the big leagues that I started taking my photography to the next level. I even set up my own personal photo lab in one of the bathrooms of the house. Truth be told, that was just way too much work and pretty expensive for a kid in high school. I think I dabbled in the darkroom for only a few months because it was so much easier to just drop off those film canisters to the photo store and wait a week to have the images professionally developed. That darkroom stuff was fun for a while, but way too much work.

In college, I managed to destroy a Canon AE-1 which I loaned to a friend to take on a hiking trip. When I got the camera back, it was all sticky and completely ruined. Apparently, there was a leaky fruit punch container in the same backpack that he was carrying my camera around in. I learned early on not to loan gear to friends, unless it was something I could afford to lose. Luckily for me though, that little hiking faux pas was my chance to upgrade my AE-1 to the AE-1 Program which came out that same year (1981). I never got to thank my friend because I guess I was still a bit angry about having to spend $700 that I didn’t have to replace my camera (I think I had to work an entire summer for that single purchase). I would hang on to that new AE-1 Program for over 15 years. To be perfectly honest, I may still have it in storage somewhere, but I’m thinking it may have gotten sold at one of our last moving sales.

Fast forward to the digital age of photography. Those original DSLRs were frankly too damn expensive for a hobbyist. I would have to wait. In the meantime, I must’ve owned at least a half-dozen point-and-shoots. I can recall owning Olympus, Fujifilm, Canon, Panasonic and Sony gear. None of these were really serious cameras. They were handy dandy gear that could be tossed into Jojo’s purse or my backpack (these were before the advent of the phone cameras widely used by most folks today). I think I started buying these bad boys from the time that 1.3MP was the most typical resolution. Today, my iPhone’s camera is almost 10 times as sharp as those early digital cameras.

A fairly long time had passed since I owned a “real” camera and I had never before owned a Nikon. So, in early 2015 (February), I was lucky enough to win all 4 quarters of the Superbowl pool and ended up $400 richer than I was pre-game. I decided to get myself an entry-level DSLR. I went to Costco and saw that the Nikon D3300 Kit was priced at $499.99. That’s $100 over budget, so I decided to wait. One day I was shopping at Sam’s Club and noticed that they had an open box of that same kit and the price was right at $400. Voila! I was able to get into a DSLR at no cost to me (so you could say I lucked into it).

In the summer of 2015 I was asked to chair the Transpac Honolulu Photography Committee. For those who don’t know, the Transpac is a Trans-Pacific Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu which is held every other year. At that time, I was on the Waikiki Yacht Club’s Board of Directors serving as the Rear Commodore for Power and was very involved with all things WYC. I took over the committee and have been chairing it ever since. One thing that serving in this capacity brought to my attention was how much I needed to improve as a photographer. I was surrounded by professionals and I was merely taking snapshots whilst they were capturing some of the most exciting images imaginable. Action shots of racing yachts from the water, from the sky, you name it and they were capturing it. It made me feel amateurish, mainly because I was.

This year, I’ve decided to up my game. I purchased a second hand Nikon D5500 on Craigslist and decided I would start improving myself as a shooter. I took a lot of Transpac photos again this summer and I decided I wanted to shoot my wife’s Na Wahine O Ke Kai Outrigger Canoe Race from Molokai to Waikiki (41 miles). The first time she did the race was 2014 and I didn’t have the gear. She skipped a few years, and when she did the race again in 2018, I was the Commodore of the Yacht Club and I was away on the Mainland at a function hosted at St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco, so I missed the women’s Molokai race last year. This year, I wanted to capture the event in photographs, mostly for her to show what a truly challenging accomplishment the race is. I took a lot of shots this year and you may be able to find some of that work if you search SmugMug and Facebook. I still want to improve my skills which is why I’ve decided to start these Photo Assignments on Youtube.

I know that this was a really long post for my first Tumblr post, but I wanted to introduce myself by letting you know a little bit of my background and more importantly, why I am here. I’m not sure where I’ll be taking this, but at least I have posted something of a brief history along with what I hope to achieve with this social media space. Wish me luck. It is my intention to share without reservation, so I hope you all enjoy seeing my process from day one... Aloha!