This picture marks the day I took photography as a serious hobby.
But how did I get there? My late godfather was an avid photographer and filmmaker on top of his day job as pharmaceutical agent and pharmacist. He gave me a film camera for my eighth or ninth birthday. That camera planted the seed of my interest in photography, although it was ruined before I learned how to use it. I got a couple of cameras afterwards but have no recollection of anything I did with them.
Years later, on the day I graduated from college, my uncle gave me a Panasonic VHS camera and a Minolta SLR. For a while I was obsessed with videography. I mostly enjoyed making videos of flowers and butterflies and my younger sisters playing in the backyard. Quite a few times I recorded weddings, birthdays, and baptisms of relatives or their friends. I quickly realized that people are hard subjects to work with. Film and processing were very expensive, so I never got to experiment with photography back then. I also found that the SLR was less forgiving than my smaller point-and-shoot.
I brought my Minolta when I moved to the US. A couple of months after I arrived, with the film I had loaded back home, I made a few pictures of the Salt Lake Mormon Temple and other landmarks. It was Christmas season and luckily for me it was the golden hour, though I had no clue. My friend gave me a few tips on how to set my camera to P and turn off flash. He suggested that I put it on a solid surface, so I took my jacket and used it to prop the camera. This resulted in a beautiful picture that I enlarged and framed. That frame has been near my desk in every home I have lived in for 28 years. Mostly luck got me a beautiful picture. I used that camera throughout grad school to photograph some memorable moments in the beautiful national parks of Utah and Wyoming. The camera finally gave out and I stopped photographing for a while, until I bought a Nikon D70 just before my son was born. For a couple of years he became my obsession, although I got a few nature pictures here and there. That camera was stolen from my trunk.
A couple of years later I got a D90 just before my daughter was born and the kids again became my obsession. But we also moved closer to Yosemite around that time and I took some nice photos there.
After another couple of years of experimentation with my D90, and years of unstructured attempts at trying to learn photography seriously, I joined a photography workshop at Yosemite led by a local photographer and photography professor at Merced Community College. It was a beginners class, although I quickly realized that all the other members of the group had a more sophisticated understanding of cameras.
On arrival I switched to RAW and manual settings and never looked back. I learned how to read the meter, histogram, and the compromise between sharpness and grain. We spent most of the time in the valley, where the lesson was how to shoot backlit foliage. Most importantly, I learned that the key is calm observation of every detail and all angles and directions.
This is my best from that valley session.