So you want to know something more about me? Okay, here we go…

When I was a kid, I already liked photographing. At the age of 8 I bought myself a camera, a very small one, working with C110 films. I saw it in a second-hand shop walking home from school. The camera had no flash built-in and when I needed flash I had to buy flash-units seperately, of which the bulbs could only be used 1time. Fortunately it had 4 bulbs in one housing, so I could use the units 4 times (wow!).

This wasn’t a very practical camera, it was okay for people shots or holiday shots, but since it had no zoom or focus it couldn’t be used for anything else. I really discovered that when I went to the Naval Air Station close to my house and wanted to take pictures of the Orions based there. Looking through the viewfinder it looked pretty nice, but once I picked up the photos at the drug store, the planes were – of course – only very small on it.

I became older and as school ate much of my time, my interest in photography cooled down a bit. I also spent too much of my time behind computers (I still do, actually…), but then came the age of digital photography. I worked with one of the first Canon digital compact cameras, which was fun to work with. It had no autofocus, no ISO could be set, it was all very basic. The resolution was also very low, but it was okay for the work we did: product photography for websites. Time went by and so did the development of digital cameras. I bought a HP Photosmart camera, which was very big (since it used 4 penlite batteries) and because of that not very practical to carry in a pocket (I still don’t know why they called it a “compact” camera  ). But it took nice pictures, had 3.2 megapixels, optical zoom, but it was very very slow. Between hitting the shutter and the camera actually taking the picture was almost 2 seconds!

My interest in airplanes had grown more and more meanwhile and I even went to airshows wih friends of mine. All very cool, but with a camera this slow I couldn’t really take nice pictures of the shows themselves. Apart from the shutter-delay, the autofocus was also very slow, often focussing wrong, and no option for manual focus.

Then one day I decided to buy a Canon digital SLR and a zoomlens. I bought it on a summer afternoon, just 2 days before an airshow, so I had to get familiar with it very soon. Shooting all afternoon in my backgarden, making pictures of my cats, of the planes flying overhead on their approach to Amsterdam Airport, I tried a lot of things, though still operating on fully automatic mode. That automatic mode really got me angry at the airshow itself, poping up the flash everytime. I soon discovered the half-automatic P-mode and used that quite happily for a long time. But I was very happy with one thing especially: the response of the shutter was instant!  “Now that’s a camera to take action-shots with!” was what I thought that day.

It didn’t take very long before I bought an external flash, wanting to create some more creative pictures. The flashgun really improved my pictures. No harsh overflashed pictures anymore, but nice balanced ones. I was happy again.

I took my camera with me to carshows (as I’m also a big car-fan (well, actually of everything with technique in it) ), and took loads of pictures. Not only of the cars, but also the ladies promoting the cars (or just standing there with a lovely smile). It was on such shows that I discovered it’s nice to work with people. Telling them how to pose, how to look, and get nice feedback from them, it really caught me.

I also did photographing on parties for a while and it was during that time that I really learned a lot about the camera, photographing in full manual mode.

I still do the shows, I met some great people there, both photographers and models. My plans for the future are to do more with models, and to build a small home-based studio. But that costs a lot of money, and I also want to upgrade my camera and lenses. So it’s all about consessions now… Photography is not the only thing I spend my money on, and everything is getting more and more expensive. But hey, good times are on the horizon again.

Well, that’s my life concerning photography in short. Of course more comes to mind when this article is finished, so I will update it regularly. For now, this is it.

René