Photography One-Doh-One

Jeff Jarvis once told a crowd of prospective CUNY Journalism students (including me) that the best preparation for graduate studies in journalism is to read actively, write frequently, and develop the technological skills that all reporters are expected to know. Since I'm currently unencumbered with employment, I decided to follow his advice and learn how to take pictures.

My dad is an avid photographer so it wasn't long before I was armed and outfitted with thousands of dollars worth of equipment that I was hopeless unqualified to use. Still, I shambled my way through some beaches and awkwardly pushed some buttons and it soon dawned on me that golfing and photograph-ing have a lot in common.

I didn't take this picture, but I do tie it together (that's me in the center)

Both activities make me very uncomfortable; in golf, trailing teams like to enjoy the spectacle of me hacking at my ball like a butcher cutting up a slab of meat. When I pretend to be a photographer, I can feel passer-bys's eyes measuring my dad's huge camera clutched in my hands, then judging my pained expression, and finally concluding that I am waiting in the bushes because I'm trying to snap a primo shot of twelve-year-old flanking.

The biggest similarity, however, lies in the aching promise of semi-adequacy. Whacking your way through a golf course and snapping a photo that doesn't incorporate your thumb requires suffering through a hundred bad shots before a hint of mediocrity will excite you beyond rational thought and convince you that your next photo of a perfectly composed sparkling landscape, or primo twelve-year-old flanking, is one more button click away.

The one photo without my thumb

Fortunately, my dad has enough toys to make even the most amateur photographer (me) look like I know what I'm doing, so roughly one photo turned out okay. Here it is. And before you ask, Hawaii does not normally look like Mars except when viewed through an infrared lens.