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Hi! I'm Kevin. I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in December of 1970.
I didn't really get interested in taking pictures until my Junior year in high school. I had previously owned a Kodak 110 camera and then a Disc camera. Neither of these plastic cameras lasted very long since I wasn't particularly gentle with them. It was a bit later that I got my first 35mm camera -- an already old Canon SureShot Supreme at a local flea market. While this old Canon took some pretty nice pictures, they never quite turned out the way I had hoped or imagined. Talking with a classmate, he introduced me to his Minolta Maxxum 7000. I wanted one! But I couldn't afford one, so I went for a used Maxxum 5000 which I found at a pawn shop. The possibilities for photography expanded with this, my first SLR. I began taking more and more pictures and had a great time. |
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Hawaii has some beautiful sunsets and they are a perfect subject for photography. However, despite my newly acquired SLR, I was still disappointed with the prints that came back from the photo lab. The color just wasn't right -- it was too dull and muddy. I began to look into *why* the color was off, and that's when I learned that slide film could give me results that I wanted.
Finally, I started to get on film the rich colors that the sky displays for us twice every day. I was hooked and I began to take more and more photographs of my island home, learning a little more every time by trial and error. My interest in photography was at a peak between 1993 and 1995. With a few encouraging awards received for my work and looking at a possible future in photography, I was pretty happy with the photographs I was creating... In 1996 I captured "Moonlight and Misty Waves", an image I had sought for a year and a half, and this became the last photograph from that period in my life. There surfaced a part of me that wasn't satisfied with my photographic work. I couldn't resolve this internal conflict and so I stopped taking pictures. |
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I find it a bit strange that several years later in the spring of 2000, now living in Japan and despite having many "better" cameras to use, the spontaneous purchase of a klunky, funky Kiev 88 camera has gotten me excited about photography again.
Using this unforgiving, crude, all-mechanical, all-manual camera from the Ukraine has forced me to once again start thinking about the elements that go into creating a good photograph. And at the same time, having taken a break from scenic photography has given me a chance to reflect on what I had been doing and what is important to my personal vision. I think I have finally come to terms with what my photography was, and is, about. My surrounds have changed and I can no longer photograph the seascapes that I loved in Hawaii, but my enthusiasm is up and with my camera in hand I will go out in search of new subjects and new inspirations. |
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