The Photographer - Michael Simms

I’ve always been a visual person. That’s how I take in information and learn. As a little kid, photography fascinated me. I never enjoyed reading and would just flip through magazines or catalogues to 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. 

 My dad had an old school Polaroid camera. 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. After the development time had passed he would pull it apart and voila!, there would be the photograph. I thought that was so cool. My family graduated to a Kodak 110 Instamatic. This was my first opportunity to do photography on my own.  I really enjoyed it, but 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. 

In 2023 I returned to shooting film with the intention of shooting medium format as my primary film size. I wanted that larger negative. I knew I would never be able to wait to get my film back from processing so I learned how to develop at home. Using the basement storage room (my room that is dark), our laundry room and guest bathtub to process my film. (You don’t need a pricey professional set-up to make magic happen!)  I use one of my Sony cameras on a copy stand to make a digital scan of the negative and 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.