Wow! Where have the years gone, all 22 of them, yes that’s right 22 years since I opened the doors to my shiny new business SMS Creative Photography here at 83 Station Road East, Oxted, Surrey on 10th February 1997.
A very big thank you to all of you my lovely customers, because without you I would not be celebrating this significant milestone with much ambition for the future.
I have made many changes since 1997 having grown professionally and personally evolving with the times, including the services I offer, my style of photography and in 2011 the change of logo and a new shop front.
The shop front then and now.
However the one momentous change for me and all of you too, has been the introduction of digital photography and all that goes with it on the post production side, this has revolutionised the way I work.
When I first opened the studio I was loading countless rolls of film into my various cameras with either 36 or 12 exposures depending on the format of the camera, then taking the exposed colour, black & white or sepia film to be processed at different specialists, all of which was very time consuming and somewhat restrictive creatively.
I was first introduced to the world of digital photography back in 1999 when I bought my first computer, I never imagined it would ‘catch-on’ because the quality back then did not have the clarity and finesse it does now.
So it was with much trepidation I stepped or ‘clicked’ into unchartered waters and made the gradual change-over at the turn of the century becoming fully digital in 2004.
As we all know there are so many benefits to digital photography - the obvious ones are that you can view your image instantly and share it worldwide at the tap of a button or blink of the eye, the post production, which was once a skill restricted to a very few is now far more accessible to the masses.
I do love the benefit of making multiple copies of a image without loss of quality, something that was not possible with a negative as each generation of a copy would reduce the clarity.
However none of this changes the fact that I come armed with 40 years creative experience to know what the exposure of an image should be instinctively without having to check every single image, a skill learnt back in the days of film photography.
If you haven’t had a photo-shoot with me for a while what are you waiting for? There is a wonderful world out there just waiting for me to take you and your loved ones out and about on a photo-shoot to mark a moment in time for now and many, many years to come…
Thank you and bye for now!
Stella
To read other previous blogs these can be found on the ‘Featured’ blogs below by using the arrows on the right to scroll through the past 30 blogs.
