In case any of you might not know, photography is not just a hobby for me, but has been my career since since 2006. For a time, it was strictly business and wasn’t even a hobby. And having grown up with little interest in it, photography was something I surprised to find myself doing at all.
With a background more in drawing and painting, photography was something that remained cloaked in mystery compared to those things I could make with my hands. Besides the occasional documentation of life with some automatic camera as is customary, I seldom dabbled with it growing up. Film cameras and darkroom developing in particular seemed like strange voodoo. The romanticization of the medium and legacy didn’t help it be any less intimidating. Those who understood it seemed like a pretty exclusive club. It was through a circuitous back-end route that I eventually arrived. As an artist, I was intrigued in the early 2000’s by digital art, and began playing around with Photoshop- digital painting, but also messing around with photographs. I could make and manipulate images without having to know anything about lenses or pushing film. My experience in dabbling with retouching photos gave me the confidence to apply for a job as a pro-retoucher, which I did for a short while, cleaning up photos for the hospitality industry. And it was this job that opened the door for me to be hired to both retouch as well as shoot real estate photos. I was bringing my photoshop skills, and was provided some basic camera training. This practical experience is exactly what I needed to peel away the layers of mystique, especially since working with the files in post helped me understand what the results would be and what I was aiming for. I could know the end-to-end process. So now the camera was no longer a magical light-capturing device (even though it is), but was just a tool. A tool for gathering information that I needed. It took some more time, experience, and a little boredom, before I started thinking about and using my camera as something I could use more creatively, for my own personal expression. But eventually I felt comfortable enough to see the artistic potential of myself as photographer, and the camera as one of my artistic tools. Without my commercial photo profession, this would never have happened.
So now photography for me is two different things, professional and personal. And so I have two different web sites, this one and jamesalfred.photography
You can also check out Adrian’s work here:
