An Imbecilic Obsession with Light

My dad is the most prolific photographer I’ve met in real life. Not the most talented. The most prolific.

He was a closet gear nut - literally. I filled my room with cameras, cables, audio equipment, books and lenses. Chaos with intention. My dad locked everything in drawers and closets. You’d never know he owned any of it.

By the time I was 10, he’d filled 150-200 albums with prints. Every brand you could think of - Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Fuji, Konica Minolta, Kodak. Mostly point and shoot. All of it documented.

Why did I pick up a camera? Obviously.

My own journey was bleh for a while. Point and shoot through my late teens. Got my first DSLR, kept shooting on auto, same as point and shoot. Everything changed when I got into Lightroom and Photoshop. Not because of the tools. Because of what I was practicing on. I was messing around with photoshop to make newspaper ads for a nightclub :)

By the late 2000s, a few serious photographers were giving away RAW files for free - YouTube channels, websites, editing walkthroughs. I’d download their unprocessed images and edit them myself. I started noticing something. These shots were already great before I touched them. Nothing like my stuff.

They were layered. Geometric if you sat with them long enough. And above everything — each one was a deliberate play with light.

That’s when the obsession started. I went deep. Videos, courses, all of it. I was close to giving up when I met a watchmaker in Dallas. 65 years old. Serious hobby photographer. Every Sunday morning, he walked downtown with his camera.

First Sunday we walked together, he said: “A camera has a sensor that captures light reflecting off things. A true photographer knows how to control what hits that sensor.”

That was it. The primitive. Once you have the primitive, everything else is just practice. I got it fast after that. Architecture is always my love. Urban scenes. Night shots. My daughter. Romo. Years of it.

Then I sold the D40 on Craigslist. It had become a chore. That’s the part people misread. They think that’s where the story ends. It isn’t. The camera was never the point.

Playing with light was the point. Controlling it, shaping it, deciding what gets in and what doesn’t. The camera was just the tool I happened to be holding when I first understood that. The obsession didn’t leave. It found new material, and new tools.

Many years later, my work was published. It found walls which were beyond vanity - in Como, Nayarit, Tokyo, New York, Budapest, Tulum, and more. Not because of gear or credentials - because I understood one thing early: composition is deciding what matters and what doesn’t. Everything else is noise.

I still see in frames. Every room I walk into, every system I build, every problem someone brings me - I’m always asking the same question the watchmaker asked first.

What are you letting hit the sensor? What will you do with it?

To be continued…