Our continuing artistic journey

Dave's story:   (at least on some early photography- and artistic-related aspects)

My love for photography was kindled by several things when I was around 7 years old - my grandmother had given me a Camera before a family vacation to the Grand Canyon that summer, and I was so proud of what I was sure to be epic pictures, only to have my younger brother, who was only ~4 years at the time, break the film door-latch on the camera and exposed my roll of film...oh well, I still have that film and the memories

The other factors were a combination of an Ansel Adams book of photographs I looked through around the same time the Simon & Garfunkel Kodachrome song (1973) which mentioned a Nikon camera was popular on the radio - which I thought was cool because my Dad had a Nikon camera - and my Dad took the pictures below and developed the prints in our basement darkroom which my brothers and I sometimes helped with...(and yes, Dad was an engineer too, like I eventually became)

My mother to this day is a creative and artistic teacher for me, she is accomplished in several diverse mediums of painting, sculpture and music....I never got the hang of the piano but I enjoyed creating detailed drawings of trees in grade school and eventually played the alto-saxophone in high school

Also around the end of high school I started learning to use a Canon Canonet QL 17 G-III rangefinder (film) camera.  Near the end of college I got to travel some and took that camera to England and ultimately Australia where I think it ultimately jammed because of two weeks on a dual-sport motorcycle tour of Victoria/New South Wales (between Melbourne and Sydney), so I moved to a film-based Canon Rebel for the next few years

The Canonet was a breeze to use, and it lasted many years (maybe surprisingly long)...but it's limitations were pretty obvious when I wanted to try to get up-close action shots at events - like these scanned images from Kodakchrome slides taken with it late 1985

My switch to digital photography was tempered by my experience at work using an early digital model Canon Powershot 600 (~0.5M maximum pixels) from 1996-1998...which was better in black and white mode for pictures of engine hardware, but the small images were nowhere close to film-based photographic quality - and transferring over a dial-up phone modem still took considerable time (The younger generation can be happy they didn't have to suffer those relatively primitive times).  I remember discussions with my dad around that time about whether digital cameras would ever approach film quality in our lifetimes...well, as it turned out, that technology advanced more quickly than either of us guessed

After a stint with a Canon Optura 60 for filming our young kids and converting to cd-rom video on an 2000 iMac DV (painful days) we transitioned through over a dozen progressive Canon digital Rebel and later EOS models, but it wasn't until my wife and I finally invested in higher quality L-lenses and long telephoto lenses that we started trying to get some better bird and wildlife images on weekends and vacations around 2014

In 2016, all four of our kids were competing in sports at their school (Track and Cross-Country), which I had competed in also decades earlier, so I figured I would try to capture their efforts even if they didn't seem to want pictures of themselves at the time...(Go Raiders!)

Since then, during planning for each new big trip, we'd discuss the merits of investing in better camera gear, especially before separate trips to Iceland and later Japan, then Alaska... and I am happy that we did

We have also dabbled in some astrophotography, (which is something I had tried 40 years ago and without satisfying results), and with the amazing Hubble and James Webb orbiting telescopes I wonder sometimes "why bother?"  Ultimately for me, its because of the challenge to "see what you can get" and learn new photographic techniques and skills

From a personal perspective, Sylvie is the organized one.  After vacation trips she would put together the family videos,DVD's, and photo album books, and I am thankful for all her work over the years doing that...maybe I can persuade her to share her story...