Remembering life before memory cards

Before coming to this job, my experience taking photographs was limited to an occasional foray with a point-and-shoot and a protracted — and losing — battle with a 35mm Canon.

Now, nearly a year later, I can speak somewhat intelligently about exposure and aperture and composition and every so often get a shot that I feel compelled to e-mail my parents. Quite the change.

I reflect on my relatively greenhorn status because with summer here and the season's accompanying slathering of events, I've taken north of 1,000 frames since July 1. With this weekend chock full of events ranging from Relay for Life to the Somers Cajun Street Dance, I may well take 1,000 more before next week. That's an awful lot of pictures for someone who's never considered himself a photographer.

It's a funny term, photographer. No matter the event, whether a volleyball game or a committee meeting, walk in with a fancy looking camera and someone will come up and ask questions about it and tell you they too are a photographer. Are they? Who knows.

If there's one thing that has surprised me more than how much I enjoy taking pictures, it's the amount of respect I have simultaneously gained and lost for photographers.

On the one hand, I now know that any fool can take a decent picture and even gets lucky sometimes with a great one (exhibit A: yours truly). Today's digital cameras can be as complicated as you want to make them, but microprocessors and all manner of automatic features can atone for almost any mistake.

By contrast, however, I have seen how hard it is to make great pictures. Ones that are original and poignant and striking are incredibly difficult to get and it takes no small amount of talent and artistry to capture those images on anything resembling a regular basis.

In newspapers and magazines and at art shows and even in galleries, I am now constantly unimpressed by the mediocrity of many photos. The bar I have set being whether or not I think I could do the same.

But in all those same venues I am also dumbstruck by how some people can evoke things from scenes I could never do justice. It is a wonder that we're using the same equipment, their finished product being in an entirely different realm than mine.

Luckily for the more marginally talented shooters among us, this is Montana, where most days you can close your eyes and press the shutter button and things turn out just fine. And as I quickly fill up my computer's hard drive with my stuttering pursuit of art, hopefully things will turn out a little better than that.

—Alex Strickland