Driftwood Photography Studios

Welcome to Driftwood Photography Studios blog! This is to be the first of hopefully many blog entries as I work to progress my hobby/sporadic freelancing to a full time, professional photography service. I'll keep you up on how I got into this all, what I'm doing, inroads I'm making, notable contacts, publication, and in the end hopefully a success story!

Why switch career paths to photography, one might ask? The simple reason: it's my passion. Who wants to have just a job when your job can be what you chose to do in your spare time?

The Story:
For years I've loved photography. First using little point-and-shoot cameras as a kid, up until I was given my first SLR as a bar-mitzvah present by my uncle. He always had the best camera gear. All the new film cameras as the came out. The Nikon N90, then very soon after the N90s. Of course at the same time he also had the pro level cameras: the Nikon F1, selling and trading as the came out through the F5. Talk about a cool cameras. Lenses, filters, he had it all.

It was a Nikon N60. Not the fanciest camera in the world, but a solid camera nonetheless. 14 years later I still have it and it works as good as the day I opened the package! That's gotta say something.

One of the things that first really turned me onto photography was double exposures. Stand on the right side of the car, he told me one passover. Click. Ok, now go stand on the other. Click. An hour later we got the film back, and sure enough, there I was on both sides of the car! Blew me away.

So I had my N60 and a couple of cheap lenses. It was always a fun hobby. We'd go on family vacations and I'd have my camera to take pictures with. Thanks initially to my uncle and then further from my father I learned about shutter speeds, aperture pushing the iso, over exposing on the beach, filters, all the basics.

Flash forward to my senior year of high school. I went on a Holocaust remembrance trip: the March of the Living. 6,000 Jewish teens from around the globe converge on Poland, tour the work/death camps, hold a memorial service at Auschwitz/Birkenau, leave Poland as witnesses to the worst that man can do, then celebrate life for a week in Israel. Pretty emotional.

I lived behind my camera; my father's N90s, actually (formerly my uncle's, he'd sold it to my father and purchased the latest and greatest), capturing raw emotion, scenic vistas, and the evidence of death and murder. Quite a combination.

For me the trip was also my senior project, meaning that I researched the Holocaust, gave a presentation to my "March" group at on the history of Lodz, Poland while we were there, and kept a photo journal of the trip. In exchange I got to drop all my courses (save English) for the second semester of my senior year.

Two weeks, 25 rolls of film, one hell of a collection of journals. From then on I carried some sort of camera with me nearly all the time, least I miss something.

It wasn't until years 5 years later, in 2005 when I was on my way home from living abroad in Australia that the next big leap came. I was editing photos on my laptop at 30,000 feet (maybe it was 35,000 feet...either way, we were way high up crossing the Pacific), when the woman behind me tapped my shoulder. Those are amazing. Do you have a website or sell those?

And that was it, seed planted.