National Camera Day: The Machine That Changed How I See

A Holiday for the Machine

National Camera Day falls on June 29, and it’s worth separating from its cousin, World Photography Day in August. World Photography Day celebrates the art and history of the craft. National Camera Day honors the machine itself, the actual device that captures the light.

The camera is an unusual piece of engineering history. The earliest ones were monsters. The first daguerreotype outfits weighed something like fifty pounds and came with a box of toxic chemicals and metal plates you had to polish to a mirror shine. Taking a single picture was a chemistry project. Then George Eastman put film in a simple box, and by 1888 the Kodak camera let anyone press a button and capture a moment.

From there the machine kept shrinking and improving until it disappeared into your phone. The camera is one of the few inventions that changed how human beings hold onto the past.

Watch: The Entire History of Photography, I Guess, Overexposed

My Long Line of Cameras

I’ve owned a lot of cameras, and the story of my cameras is really the story of how deep the obsession went.

It started with a cheap little film camera a girlfriend gave me in the late 1980s. That was the whole kit, one basic camera and a roll of film, and it was enough to get me hooked on photographing flowers and birds and bugs and everything else in the backyard. A camera doesn’t have to be fancy to change your life. That cheap one changed mine.

After I got married, the camera sat in a drawer for a long while. Then my wife Claudia passed away in 2005, and I picked it up again. The full story of that turn, from grief to the desert to the belly dance community, is in my memoir Adventures of a Belly Dance Photographer. Photography gave me a reason to go back out into the world and look at it closely, and once I was back, I didn’t stop.

I got a new camera, then another, then another, each one bigger and more capable than the last. Every upgrade opened up something I couldn’t shoot before, more reach, more speed, more control in bad light. The machine kept growing because the things I wanted to photograph kept demanding more of it.

What the Bigger Cameras Let Me Do

Each step up in gear unlocked a new world of subjects. The progression was about what each machine made possible.

I went from nature to Renaissance fairs, and the fairs became a huge part of my photography.

Then belly dancers, where you need speed and good low-light performance to freeze fast motion in a dim tent. Professional wrestling, back when it was WWF. It’s all explosive movement and hard arena lighting. Reenactments of World War Two and the Civil War, full of smoke and chaos and distance, where you need a longer lens.

The circus, where I got VIP access to a moving stand in the center ring, surrounded by motion in every direction.

I did credentialed work too. I was the photographer for Trader Joe’s at the Rose Parade in Pasadena, going out every year with two tickets and a friend, standing in the cold dark at four in the morning waiting for the light. I was the official photographer for the Irwindale Renaissance Faire and several other fairs, and I shot the Arizona Renaissance Festival many times. Every one of those jobs asked something different of the gear, and that’s why the cameras kept getting bigger.

The archive from all of it now runs to roughly 980,000 photographs.

The Camera Is a Tool, Not the Talent

The camera doesn’t make the picture. You do.

A better camera unlocks subjects you couldn’t shoot before, faster action, dimmer light, longer distances. That’s real, and it’s why I kept upgrading. But the machine has never once decided what to point at, when to press the button, or what to leave out of the frame. Those are the choices that make a photograph, and they live in the photographer. I’ve seen great images shot on cheap phones and boring ones shot on equipment that cost more than a car.

The camera is a tool. The eye is the talent.

That’s the same truth in every craft. The best word processor in the world won’t write your book. The most expensive guitar won’t make you a musician. The tool can remove obstacles and expand what’s possible, but it can’t supply the vision. On National Camera Day it’s worth celebrating the machine for what it is, a powerful instrument that does exactly nothing until a person with something to say picks it up.

What does the camera teach about writing?

My cameras made me a better writer. Years of looking at the world through a viewfinder trained the exact instinct that good prose requires.

A camera forces you to decide what’s in the frame and what’s out. You can’t photograph everything at once, so you choose, and the choosing is the art. Writing is the same discipline with a different tool. You can’t put every detail of a scene on the page, so you pick the few that count and you cut the rest. The photographer and the writer are doing the identical thing, deciding what matters and framing it so the viewer or reader sees exactly that and nothing distracting.

The camera also taught me to trust a single detail to tell a whole story. The best photograph of a Renaissance fair is rarely the wide crowd shot.

It’s one performer’s face, one pair of hands on a sword, one child staring up at a knight. That one frame says more than the panorama. Good writing works the same way. One precise, concrete detail beats a paragraph of general description every time. I learned to find that detail through a lens, and I’ve used it at the keyboard ever since.

So on June 29, pick up a camera, any camera, even the one in your phone. Point it at something that matters to you and decide what to leave out. You’ll be practicing the oldest discipline in both photography and writing, the art of choosing what the frame is for.

National Camera Day FAQ