Photography Interest

 

Personal interest in photograph

(updated Sat. Jan. 3, 2015)


My interest in photography started in the mid-80s, with the return of Halley’s Comet, and I started by taking pictures of the sky through my (modest) 60mm Tasco telescope.  The nights were cold for many of the sessions, but they were fun, even when the pictures disappointed... the ones that were good made up to the many more that didn’t turn out.


Later, in the mid-90’s, and I used a combination of 110 and 35mm cameras for simple point-and-shoot.


While working on my first out-of-town assignment (flying to/from each Monday/Friday), I

  1. -learned about the beauty of night time photography as those were some of the first websites I visited as the internet started to grow:

  2. -http://www.lostamerica.com

  3. -http://www.thenocturnes.com

  4. -http://www.tompaiva.com

  5. -purchased a 70-210mm telephoto lens at The Camera Shop  in Muskegon, MI.



These are the first photos I took with that lens:







Muskegon provided me with both time to explore photography, and thankfully, much great scenes that made it easy to capture some great photos, including (these with the 50mm):








At that time in 1997-98, the internet was really starting to gain popularity.  I discovered some sites that helped me get more interested in night photography:


  1. -http://www.lostamerica.com

  2. -http://www.thenocturnes.com




For our first Christmas as a married couple, Ann Marie purchased me a 19-35mm wide-angle lens, from Creve Coeur Camera, that really opened up the creativity.  Our photos of the Eiffel Tower were some of the ones I liked the most from the trip we took Christmas 1999 - New Years 2000.







Once Matt was born, our friend’s Tim shared with us his digital camera.  We quickly purchased an Olympus Optio 430RS.  I lasted ~ 3,000 photos, until shortly after Abby was born.


While looking for a new camera one evening in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, I discovered on the Kodak website that they had an awesome 12-megapixel cameral.  We wound up working through 10,000+ pictures on each of four different Kodak Z1275 and Kodak Z1285 cameras.  Sadly Kodak has stopped making cameras... that was truly a sad day as they capture the sky in such an awesome way.


So many of our favorite family and travel photos are shared via our Family’s website:  http://vanvooren.us/


Now it’s onto the iPhone 6 Plus!


Some information about how to have fun photographing with your iPhone 6 / smartphone, is found at: 

http://vanvooren.us/Photography/SmartPhone_Cameras.html