In 2005, when I was in high school, I got my first camera. It was a dinky little thing, a pocket camera with maybe five megapixels in total and not a single manual control, not exactly the best quality, but it was the beginning of my understanding of composition. From there I saved up enough from my crappy retail job and got a Nikon D3000 with a kit lens. My understanding of manual settings was still non-existent at this point, but I was enjoying the depth of field and improved pixel count, and further built up my skills in framing. While I was in college, I upgraded to a Nikon D7000, and it was with this camera (and the knowledge that was bestowed upon me by my teachers in the Television and New Media Production program) that I started to experiment with manual settings. Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO no longer evaded me as these hard to understand concepts, and I forced myself to expose images on full manual, rather than on priority modes to increase my skills in exposure. This resulted in a lot of images that were either blurry, overexposed, or underexposed, but whenever I nailed composition and exposure, I'd feel an incredible sense of pride. Eventually I developed an almost innate sense of exposure based on the lighting conditions, and the number of actually good images I took in a single photo session increased dramatically. But despite all this improvement, I still felt like I was missing something. Whenever I would compare my photos to those of professionals, mine didn't quite stack up.
When I graduated college, I began freelancing in film and video production, and got an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for Premier for editing projects. One day, I browsed through the software I had available to me and noticed Lightroom; I was intrigued. Realizing it was a photo editing application was like a light bulb moment - that was what my photos had been missing! I went on YouTube, looked up tutorials for Lightroom, and started experimenting with the software. It took a few years of messing around to really understand the program and to find my style, but once I did, it was like a door had unlocked for me. My skills finally matched what I had been dreaming of being able to do for years. I have been wanting to sell my prints for quite a long time now, but never had the time to go through my decade's inventory of photos, nor did I know how to start the selling process.
In the world of freelance it's feast or famine, it's busy or it's not, and I worried about being able to fulfill orders during the busy seasons. Enter darkroom - this website allows photographers to upload their photos, and they handle the printing and shipping to customers. I was grateful to discover this website, because it meant I could upload my photos so they're available for print without the added stress of fulfillment on my end. Over the last year I have been combing through my hard drives, and have edited some of my best photos. I am pleased to say they are now ready and available for purchase (or even just for your viewing pleasure if you don't have wall space).
Check out my Darkroom Gallery!
