Over zealous photo enthusiast.

I started taking pictures when I was 11. My father helped me make a pinhole camera with a shoe box and some B&W 4x5 sheet film one gray winter day and I've been hooked ever since. I took several courses in college in various disciplines: photojournalism, fashion, underwater photography, etc. I also did a little paid photo work earlier in my career. Now it's something between a hobby and therapy.

Digital photography is great but I miss the magic and the alchemy of developing and printing pictures with film. Digital allows us to take hundreds or thousands of images at a time and then keep a select few. The downside is that because we can shoot so much and mine the nuggets, we're less inclined to develop photography as a craft. Something that was essential when rolls of film only held 36 exposures or less and processing it took time and money. When I close my eyes I can still smell the stop bath and taste the fixer.

I challenge any beginning photographer to: use a single, fixed focal length "normal" lens, turn off the continuous (sequential) mode, use only an optical viewfinder, not playback any images while shooting, shoot no more than 36 shots, use a hand-held light meter to set exposure. Try this for a month and you will learn something about photography that you can't get online or from a book.