You Better be a great photographer or else...

The Price of a Click

Today, photography is as free as the air we breathe. A finger taps a glass screen, dozens of moments are captured in a heartbeat, and the flawed ones vanish into the digital ether without a trace. It is a beautiful freedom, but it lacks the weight of gravity. A young person can pull out a smartphone, click fifty times in a single minute, and delete forty-nine of them without a second thought. It is a world of endless second chances, where the bad photos do not matter as long as you catch a few good ones. Today's youth have it easy with their smartphones. They can snap 300 identical photos of a sandwich, delete 299 of them, and the only casualty is their battery life. It is a zero-risk game of endless second chances.

My introduction to photography in the late 1960s, however, was a high-stakes psychological thriller. When I was ten years old, starting out in the 70s, photography was an entirely different kind of commitment.

Back then, every single click had a literal price tag. Film was expensive. If you were lucky enough to use a Polaroid, every self-developing square felt like a tiny investment. Because our parents were the ones funding this expensive new hobby, the pressure was on from the very first frame. I was ten years old, armed with a camera and a dream, but zero capital. My parents were the venture capitalists funding my operations, and they were notoriously tough investors. In those days, film cost real money. If you were fancy enough to shoot on a Polaroid, each developing square felt like trading away a piece of the family fortune.

There was no room for error.

You could not afford to make mistakes, blur a moving subject, or cut off someone's head in the frame. This meant there was absolutely no room for artistic experimentation. A blurry dog? A finger over the lens? Cutting off your Aunt’s head? A single bad photo felt like a major disaster—and if you wasted a roll on poor shots, you risked having your film privileges cut off entirely. You had to learn to be sharp, precise, and genuinely good right out of the gate just to keep your camera fed. You had to become an expert marksman with the shutter button from day one, or your career was over before it started. It wasn’t just art—it was survival.

Because the stakes were so high, we were not allowed the grace of mistakes. A wasted frame was a broken promise, a blunder that could silence your camera for months.

It was a tough way to learn, but it taught us to look at the world through a careful lens. We did not just snap pictures; we waited, measured, and captured a moment only when we knew we had it exactly right.

That early, high-stakes discipline shaped everything about how I look through a lens today. Even now, in a world of digital abundance, I don’t just snap pictures—I wait for the story.

Welcome to my gallery, where every photograph is still treated as a precious investment of time, light, and memory.