Self Portrait Photography | Page 6

Where It All Began

My first self portraits (which were awful) were all shot on 35mm colour negative film, when we had to send them to a lab to be developed and printed, often waiting days for this to happen, this was way back in the 1990s, and then something happened... Digital photography happened, and the rest is history...

I bought a very basic digital camera, one by Hewlett Packard, a computer manufacturer, not widely known for their photographic equipment, however back in 2003 there was not much choice, so I bought this Photosmart 430 compact camera, with a wee 3MP sensor. The camera was never going to light up the world, but it did what I wanted it to do, and that was to be creative with my work.

I did self portraits in abandoned buildings even way back then, I have always loved those sorts of places anyway, but I soon lusted after a more powerful camera, something more like the SLR that I used to own in the late 90s, which was an EOS 300, which I used alongside the AV-1.

When Canon released the EOS 350D, it was a natural choice for me, and gave me the tools to really be able to get creative, to really express myself, and explore other aspects of me that I never really noticed before.

I guess it all began when I was 9, begging my dad to let me take a photo on holiday with the camera, he let me, and I have been hooked ever since on these once almost mystical things we call cameras, though back then not everyone had a camera on them all of the time, now it seems most folk cannot go anywhere without taking selfies on their phones.! A selfie was not even a thing back then either, not in 2003 at any rate, selfies would be a good few years away yet, a decade or more.

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