Of course photography has been a progression to me, my skills and knowledge, and expirence have all evolved over a great many years of practice.

 

In the beginning with my Kodak instamatic and Vivitar 110 I would look at my photos and wonder why??? why were they so dark? and so grainy? Why did the objects seem so far away? There was no internet then and I had nobody then who knew anything more about photography than me...

 

Then I borrowed my Dad's SR-7 and met a fellow High Schooler who made prints for the yearbook in a closet. I learned a lot that year. The SR-7 was A fully manual SLR with a external light meter built into the top. I learned to shoot using the formulas like those inside a box of film. My shots got better and exposures improved though not really creative...

 

The EOS 650 was my graduation present from my parents. It was auto everything and I used it like a P&S camera. I sure took a lot of photos with the god ol' 650 but to tell the truth I did not put much thought into the exposure settings or even really fully understand them...

 

At the same time I was killing film on auto mode with the 650 I was becoming a master in the darkroom. At least for B&W, my Cibachromes never quite came out exactly as good as I wanted it to... Eventually I ran the darkroom for the college and taught the lab classes and helped others..... and mixed a ton of chemicals.... and swept the floors...

 

After College I worked in a C-141 minilab and Mom's Uncle died and left me his Rolleicord III and Canon7 with the 50mm 0.95 lens. These cameras really opened my eyes and blew my mind. My first MF and super fast lens... I could achieve results that I never had with the SLRs... WOW the quality of my 120 prints!!! and the available light I was now capable of capturing with fast glass... like I said mind blowing...

 

The Leica M6 was next and I learned so much using this camera. The quality I could get with my 50mm f2 Summicron even approached my MF results. It was fully manual and I learned to be very creative and fully understood which shutter speed and f-stop to choose for maximum creativity, weather it was the M6 or just my past learning finally coalescing or both I don't know. I learned to love manual controls and shun the Auto modes I had relied on before...

 

The Spotmatic and F2 were manual SLR's and allowed me to use a variety of great lenses I could not have afforded on the Leica. I now was learning about the different character of lenses, like how the 50mm 1.4 Tak made awesome portraits and even gave a glow, the Nikkor 105 was very sharp, every 135 lens anyone made seemed to be just great! The amount of aperture blades also added to a lenses character... my Accura had 22 my XA had 4.

 

My children were born about the time digital SLR's were made affordable and I re-learned to use the auto modes just to keep up with them! This time I was using them much smarter and heck they now had more than one to choose as well, of course now if I did not get the results I wanted it was no problem to switch to manual and get exactly what I wanted...

 

In fact the last line sums up my progression from not knowing what I wanted to being able know what I want and know how to get it...

 

Of course any good salesperson will tell you "nobody knows what they want" and I do see the truth in that! And certainly the photographic masters would laugh at me if I declared I had it all figured out. But I have evolved, I feel good about my skills, and I hope to explore more and learn oh so much more...

 

I credit my gear for much of my progression, of course my passion and teachers have played a huge part as well.