Am I a writer or a photographer?

I’m actually a writer by trade, but it’s fascinating to me how photography and writing have taken alternate first place in my life since childhood.


My earliest writing was in about seventh grade, when I’d spend my afternoons in my bedroom with a manual typewriter, dreaming up the perfect horse story. I’ll never forget how my father teased me about a line in “The Shadow,” a story about a wild horse that the protagonist comes across in her after-school walks. Evidently, Shadow lived in a cave in the rocky hills, which I described as “your basic cave, with four walls and an entrance.” After that, everything was your “basic” this, your “basic” that. So much for a great literary career.


Although I did recover enough to major in journalism and eventually write a travel memoir titled “Aegean Escape.” That tome was inspired by a yacht trip my father and I took right after Sept. 11, 2001, and is probably the most heartfelt work I’ve done. Usually, my strength is non-fiction and education-related articles.


Meanwhile, as a teenager I was discovering the joy of photography. With tutelage from a friend, I learned about composition and exposure using a manual Minolta SLR. I set up a darkroom at home and developed my own film long before taking a formal class in college. I just loved the way the image would pop out in the developer. It’s magic, really.

Here's an early photo of my husband, Fred, developed and printed in my bathroom darkroom. (Pretty hot, huh?)





But I'll have to admit it was much easier to use the darkroom at Cosumnes River College. It’s a fabulous place, rather like a jazz lounge. You can get lost in there, listening to the music, talking to classmates and making magic happen under the enlarger. It’s one of the things I miss most about switching to digital.


But switch I did, and it’s great, really. I can snap as many frames as my camera will process (which I regularly exceed). I have the most fun during fashion shoots with my daughter, Mindi. We started shooting fashion together when she was in cosmetology school and needed portfolio shots. After my first experiments, I quickly saw the need for real studio lighting, and I haven’t looked back since. Now, it’s just a matter of what new equipment I’ll upgrade to next.

So, naturally, as soon as I can lay hands on one, I’ll be mastering the new Canon 5D Mark II. Besides capturing whopping TWENTY-ONE mega pixel images, this beauty has full HD video. From what I’ve been reading, incorporating video into presentations and slideshows is the next hot trend for photographers. I can hardly wait!

So, for now my personal writing projects are taking a back seat to photography once again. And I couldn’t be happier.