The Photographer - Michael Simms

I’ve always been a visual person. That’s how I take in information and learn. As a little kid, I never really enjoyed reading. Because of this, I would just flip through whatever magazines or catalogues were available and look at the pictures. I’ve never gotten tired of seeing that next photograph. Looking back, I can see this has been an unintentional lifelong study of photography.

Photography fascinated me as a little kid.  My dad had one of those old school Polaroid cameras. The kind where he would have to time the development after taking the photograph. After pulling the exposed frame out of the camera he would look down at his watch which he wore on the underside of his wrist. Then after the development time had passed, he would pull it apart and walla, there would be the photograph. I thought that was so cool. Then later as a teen our family got a Kodak 110 Instamatic. This was my first opportunity to do photography on my own.  I really enjoyed it, however with limited funds I did not get to do much. My photography never really went beyond that, until much later in life.

In 2013 my wife and I began to travel, and our first adventure was going to be Yosemite National Park. I decided that I would work to document our trips, which meant taking a more serious approach to photography. That is when I started practicing it as a craft.

I started with a small Fujifilm point & shoot which had an optical zoom lens and allowed for manual shooting. I started with this camera to see if photography was really something that I wanted to invest in with my time and money. It turned out that the passion and interest I had when I was younger was still there. I upgraded to a Canon SLR with a handful of lenses. I used the Canon system for about six years before switching to the Sony mirrorless system which I still use today for my digital work.

Then in 2023 I returned to shooting film and learned how to develop at home. I use one of my Sony cameras on a copy stand to make a digital scan of the negative. Then I finish in Lightroom and Photoshop.  I’ve found my work in film to be more rewarding and meaningful to me than my pure digital work. There’s just something about shooting on film with old cameras that gets my creative juices flowing. It makes me think more and helps to keep my mind active. As you have likely heard people say, shooting film will slow you down and make you more selective and deliberate with your work. This has also been my experience.

The images I observed throughout my life have been from different photography disciplines. Landscape, Fashion, Album Art , Architectural, Cinematic, Street, and the list goes on. They’ve all been downloaded into my brain over the years and now influence my previsualizations and sense of feeling when I am working in the field. I think it’s fair to say that all my compositions are derivatives of the images I’ve been exposed to throughout my lifetime.

Thank you for dropping by my little corner of Interwebs. I hope you enjoy my work.