A new (old) start

I’ve been regularly taking photos ever since getting my first camera from my dad when I started high school. It was a film camera 1990s model Yashica with a 50mm lens. Early in high school I built my confidence taking roll after roll of film learning from photographer and mentor Charles Purvis. Then I finished my last three years of high school at The Putney School where I had the immense opportunity to dive headfirst into spending countless hours in the darkroom developing my black and white photographs while learning from Jason Whiton. It was a dreamy and amazing experience being able to go from shutter click to photo-in-hand all on my own. I was so fascinated by the entire photographic process that I started building my own cameras (pinhole cameras)—something I first learned about from Charles. Here’s a short video I put together a bunch of years ago where I describe how pinhole camera’s work and show off the Pin-Holga camera I made (it’s a neat mod of the Holga 120mm format film camera).

After high school I started easing more into digital photography because it was of course a bit more convenient, but I started losing the magic that I originally came in with. Cameras just weren’t what they used to be in terms of feel and satisfaction (or at least the ones I had access to at the time). I got a bit disillusioned by the screen and menus and how what used to feel like an extension of my eyes and fingertips for adjusting exposure time, aperture, and focus now felt like a disconnected experience with flimsy buttons and no tactile feel.

Then, while working in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador (and thank god this didn’t happen any later!) I met my now good friend Joshua Vela Fonseca, an out of this world wildlife filmmaker and photographer, who encouraged me to get back into photography and helped me discover Fujifilm’s latest cameras. These were the closest I’d ever seen to the original film cameras I loved so much because the key dials (e.g., exposure time) were where I remembered them to be. So with my new Fujifilm X-T30 and 18-55 kit lens I entered a new world.

Fast forward a few years, been traveling the world with my amazing wife Sarita Mahtani Williams, and taking every opportunity to continue diving deeper and deeper into the world of photography. That brings us to today where I decided to use the commitment device of a public website and blog to push myself even further.