Lately I have been really engrossed in digging through all my old college negatives I took back in the mid to late 90’s. As some people know I was the guy on the football field in the marching band, playing an alto sax before taking photos. After two years of majoring in music I decided to switch it up. It wasn’t until 1995 when I signed up for my first photo class, when I realized I wanted to use photography as way of making a living. Wasn’t sure how, but I knew after my first class I wanted to pursuit it.

The camera I used was a Canon AE-1, fully manual 35mm. I found it by a river while camping with my family many years prior and it sat in a closet before I decided to put the thing to good use.

In 1999 I graduated college, and 10 years later finally shined light through the negatives once again. Being a photo student in college was also a great way to document the best years of my life, because I always had a camera with me.

The image pictured with this column is the very first photo I took, on the very first roll of film I developed in the bathroom of my dorm room. Nothing too exciting but it was the first thing I saw which caught my eye and I decided to snap it. Other photos such as bricks, architecture, the campus quad and my college buddies were subjects on that first roll of Kodak T-Max 400.

Part of the joy from looking through the negatives is reminiscing on the good ol’ days of college, but also seeing my eye develop from semester to semester during my photo classes.

For the past 7 years I have been strictly shooting digital and I swore would never even look at another negative. But there’s something about seeing the black and white images from back then that just brings me back to what photography is all about. Expression of one self, and freedom. Free to shoot whatever I wanted without any reason behind it other than to just click a picture. In a way bringing me back to my roots as a photographer.

Last week I met graphic design artist Roger Cline while getting a cup of coffee and we started chatting a bit about photography. He goes on to tell me he ditched his digital equipment and now shoots with a pinhole camera, which he made from pine. Since I was throwing myself back to the film era I thought it would cool to meet up with Roger and do a Q&A with him during a photo shoot with his camera.

We went to No Hands Bridge in the morning and it was a great time. No one was around, early morning light shining on the bridge and capturing a photo the old-fashioned way. No lens, no light meter, no rapid shutter. Just the light beaming through a pinhole and hitting black and white photo paper.

If there’s one thing I gained from looking through 14-year-old negs and meeting up with Roger, is that it’s all the same. Regardless of what format a person uses, digital, pinhole or film, the one common aspect is that it’s being creative with your mind and expressing it through an image for people to see.