HD SNIDER PHOTOGRAPHY

I obtained my first serious camera in 1978.  It was a Yashica TL-Electro that my brother sold to me for $50.  I eagerly began taking pictures right away and by 1980, I was winning prizes for my photographs at the county fair.  This positive reinforcement moved me to continue this pursuit.  In the quest for improving my skills, I went to the city library and began to check out books on photography.  It was my goal to read every book in the library dealing with photography.  I almost made it.  This served two purposes.  First, it exposed me to a wide range of photographic styles.  Second, it allowed me to learn composition from the masters by internalizing what I saw and retaining this skill into a visual intuitive sense of how compositions “felt” so that I could quickly compose within the confines of the viewfinder.

I soon began developing my own rolls of black and white film and printing them in a crude darkroom.  My darkroom was a windowless interior bathroom, where I had access to water for mixing the developer, stop bath, and fixer.

Because of several moves over the years, I was not able to always have a home darkroom, and I contented myself with having my pictures commercially developed and printed.  Then in 2001, I purchased my first digital camera, a 5-megapixel Canon.  Over the next nine years, I captured images using this camera and began to learn the art of photo editing using computer software.

In 2010, I upgraded my camera to an 18-megapixel Canon single lens reflex model.  Now I am able to produce large prints with extraordinary integrity.  This is the camera that I use today.

My passion is landscape photography, but I strive to keep my eyes open and capture images that are interesting to me, such as shadows, textures, and clouds.