I remember the first time I interacted with a digital camera. I was in the eighth grade and a friend of mine had taken it with him on our eighth-grade trip to Washington DC. It was one of the old models from the late 90s. It only held about a dozen or so pictures and they were very low-quality. On the same trip I had taken several disposable cameras, as those with the standard cameras that my family would use on trips. The digital camera made no sense to me. Then again I had not interacted with computers much outside of school. It wouldn’t be until the following year that my house would get its first computer, a Compaq Presario, which looking back on it was not the best computer. Up until a few years later when I would take a photography class in high school this would be the only interaction I would have with the digital camera. The high school had one digital camera for the department and it too was an incredibly old digital camera. I remember you could only take about six or eight photos on it at a time in the resolution was awful. It also was about the size of a brick. For these reasons I came to the conclusion that digital cameras would always be this way. I did nothing but film photography until I got to college. The first time I got a 35mm camera was for that high school photography class. It was a point-and-shoot. That was the first camera I had ever owned that was more than a couple of dollars. The first thing that I did was buy a few rolls of black and white film that could be processed in color processing and went out and took some pictures. Years later, my teacher in that class would comment that it was very unusual for a student to look for black-and-white film to use a new camera like that. Even when I first used a digital SLR in college I was very uncomfortable using it. You have to remember it was 2005 and any camera that could take high resolution photos at that time was priced in the thousands of dollars. One of the assignments required us to sign out a camera of that value to take home to take “professional” quality photos with. I went and checked out the camera which I was warned when I checked it out cost about $12,000, and was made to feel like uncultured white trash for not knowing anything about it including it’s value. As a result I was so scared to use it that I never removed from the case and instead took pictures of the moon and of trees blowing in the wind at night using double exposure and long exposures. I did this with one of my viewfinder cameras instead of using the SLR. When it came time to turn in that assignment, I lied and said I used the SLR as required. I was told my pictures look very good when mounted and I made an “A” on the assignment. When I bought my first digital camera it was again a cheaper point and shoot camera. I remember really enjoying the fact that I could take lots and lots of pictures and not having to pay for developing. I really just like taking pictures of seemingly ordinary things. I don’t really know why. I wish I had some sort of creative or artsy reason to make myself seem more thoughtful for it but I don’t. Shortly after I bought this camera I realized I could apply this sort of technology to my animation. I had been using a WebCam on my homemade rostrum to shoot animation with since I started doing animation in 2003. The thing that I didn’t like about taking lots of pictures is that people expect you to take lots of pictures. This is one of the things that moved me out of photography. Firstly, I was never very good at it. Just because you like something doesn’t mean you’re good at it. Secondly, it became an expectation that anytime I would be at an event or out with friends or family that I would have a camera to take pictures with, and I would be told 20 times to go take pictures of stuff. This is one of the reasons that I hesitated so long in owning a cell phone, is that hinders your ability to genuinely experience things. As Time got on I still used a dSLR to do some projects with, particularly in photographing backgrounds for animation and for documenting artwork. I always found the SLR to be a little too bulky to take places. Now I use my cell phone for much of that like the rest of the population but given I’ve only owned it since February of this year I’m still getting used to it.
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Jacob FertigArtist, Educator, Activist, Micronationalist, et al. Archives
November 2019
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