Hi there!

I'm Carmine

I became interested in photography while in middle school. I still own my first film camera, a Canon AT-1 with a 50mm f/1.8 lens. I bought it with money that I earned from mowing lawns around the neighborhood. I later added a Vivitar 135 mm f/2.8 telephoto lens and a Vivitar 283 flash. I still have those relics too. If you haven't heard of Vivitar, that's because they disappeared as a third party camera equipment provider via bankruptcy in 2008. I can't bring myself to get rid of that equipment. I'm nostalgic, I guess. Unlike all cameras sold today, including the cameras on our cell phones, the AT-1's exposure and focus had to be set manually. An automatic aperture feature was available in the Canon AE-1, but the added expense for that capability put it out of my price range as a teenager. So, I was forced to manually set focus, shutter speed, and aperture because the AT-1 simply had no automatic capabilities. Action photography, like sports, was extremely difficult. You had to continuously adjust the focus, aperture, and shutter speed rings as subjects moved and with the changing brightness of the scene. Keep in mind that this was during the film-only photography days; no digital storage. Today, we conveniently "spray and pray", shoot and store hundreds and thousands of good and bad photos on our phones, memory cards, or in the cloud because it is convenient and mostly free to do so. There is no penalty for bad photos, so long as you get a few keepers. But with film cameras, you had only 12, 24, or 36 shots to get it right. So you had to know what you were doing. Otherwise the results were underexposed, overexposed, or blurry photos. There was a real cost associated with film, processing, and prints. It wasn't free. And you didn't know if you got it right until the prints came back a few days later from a film processing lab. I used Photo Hut in the Pittsburgh area. I bet most people today don't know what a Photo Hut was!! An internet search will help if you care to learn about another company that went bankrupt due to the emergence of digital technology.

While manual-everything was a challenging way to shoot photos, it forced me to learn the fundamental principles of photography. Knowing those basics from long ago has enabled me to confidently embrace modern camera technology and to utilize many advanced features while attempting to get that perfect out-of-the-camera shot. I firmly believe that everybody should take an introductory photography class to learn the fundamental principles of exposure and focus. Doing so would remove one's hesitancy to use anything other than the camera's most basic full-auto settings. A few lessons would enable one to make minor tweaks to their camera settings to overcome the challenges associated with low light scenes, high speed action, back-lit subjects, and how to separate subjects from their backgrounds by manipulating the lens' depth of field. That's called bokeh. Your cell phone creates that effect in "portrait" mode using multiple cameras and post processing. I think that's cheating. I prefer to do that optically, but the results from cell phones are actually quite good and you don't have to spend thousands of dollars on a lens with a super wide aperture. Processing power in the digital era has made pixel manipulation a breeze, especially with the use of artificial intelligence. See that picture of me in this section? I'm not nearly that handsome in person. Yellow teeth? Pfft. Pearly white with a few clicks. Wrinkles? What wrinkles? The whites of my eyes are never that clear. If only my skin was really that smooth. Thank you Lightroom and AI. We have truly reached a point in history where we can't be certain if images are real or fake. But I digress....

During my 20s and 30s, my camera mostly stayed in my bag. I didn't have many photographic interests during those years. After my children were born, my interest in taking photos was reborn. I bought my first digital camera and began to take photos of my kids' growing years. Although I had a renewed interest in taking pictures, my passion didn't really take off until my children began to play sports, especially when Sarah began to play indoor volleyball. The union of poor lighting, unpredictable high-speed action, the net, players passing in front of my subject at the worst moment, created the most challenging photographic environment that I have ever experienced. Cell phone? Keep it in your pocket except for portraits between matches. Entry level digital camera? Meh. Dark. Blurry. The desire to get truly high quality volleyball photos drove me to invest in newer DSLR equipment with advanced features to increase my keeper rate. Those investments also enabled great results for Anthony's cross country and baseball photos. All good. And then... the Pandemic hit. Like most people early in that catastrophe, I was forced to work from home. The silver lining in that cloud for me was the convenience of photographing birds at my feeders. My interest in bird photography rapidly soared and has led to numerous excursions to parks, lakes, and rivers to photograph dozens of bird species using mirrorless camera technology. I love to photograph birds-of-prey, especially in-flight. I am fortunate to have Conowingo Dam only about an hour from my home. Each year around Thanksgiving, as many as 300 bald eagles migrate there to fish and battle on the Susquehanna River. Photographing their fishing attempts and the subsequent food fights is exciting and a little addictive. It doesn't seem to matter if I get a few great shots, I feel compelled to keep shooting and to go back again! Photography is a lot like golf: That next shot might be better than the last!! I hope that you enjoy my work. Keep coming back to see my latest additions.