After I received my BFA in Photography from SCAD in 1997, I moved out to San Francisco with two of my friends from art school. We were full of ambition and lured by the excitement of such a progressive city full of artists and free thinkers and West coast attitudes.

My first job out of school was working in a digital photography studio for Tulip Graphics. They were mostly a pre-production and press house at that time and had just invested in an $80,000 digital camera. Or rather, it was a Leaf digital back on a 4×5 Sinar P2 camera, for those that care about the specs. This digital back was the cream of the crop at the time and you had to take three shots- one with the red , blue and then green filter- and then the software compiled them into one whopping 12 megabyte file. We could not photograph anything that moved, due to the fact the camera took three passes for each shot, and we also had to wait an hour for the camera to warm up each morning. Those were the good old days, I suppose.

I think back to that time often as it was both the beginning of my career and the beginning of digital photography. I was hired to do most of the Photoshop work and learned how to use this whopper of a camera as we went along.

This photo is one of the first shots I took with this fancy schmancy camera. At the time, I was insecure about the photo, which is why I probably turned it blue and added text over it. I find that a lot of new photographers do that, they make their photos funny colors to make them more arty when really it’s a mask to cover up inadequacies in the photos. Though, I will note, what I just wrote is quite a sweeping statement due to the fact that over-processing images is a pet peeve of mine. I think that applying filters or actions to a few select images is really classy and can be quite effective. But when someone’s entire portfolio is tinged in pink or muted, I cringe. I also hate fads, so perhaps that’s my problem.

Regardless, this is one of the first digital images I took on a digital camera 13 years ago. It is of a mannequin hand holding a glass slide of a photograph of Lauterbrunnen in Swiss alps. I had just visited there the summer before and took what I had written in my journal and superimposed it on the photo. Then I printed it on an Iris printer, a precursor to our beloved Epsons of today. Gosh, I feel old suddenly.