Starting Out

It's National Camera Day. June the twenty-ninth. I only found that out this morning, and I'll admit I don't fully know what it's meant to celebrate, the camera, I suppose, the small machine that lets us hold onto things that would otherwise just pass. Which, the more I sit with it, feels like exactly the right thing to be thinking about today. Because lately I've been thinking about beginnings.

It started in 1979, with a Canon FTB. My father put it in my hands. I was a kid, and it was heavier than it looked, all metal and intention. I've written about that camera before, and about him, so I won't open it all the way up here. I'll just say this: that's where it began. A man handed his son a way of seeing, and the son never put it down.

That was forty-seven years ago. I'm fifty-nine now. And the funny thing, the thing I keep turning over, is that everything in my life at this exact moment feels like I'm starting out.

The people who love me wouldn't call it that. They'd call it a lateral move. They'd say it's just time to find out if I can do the dance myself. And maybe that's the truer way to put it, because I'm not a kid with his first camera anymore. I already know the steps. But knowing the steps and dancing alone are two different things, and the second one is scarier. Earlier this year my cousins and I became partners in a bakery, after my aunt and uncle retired. It's in California, not far, geographically, from where I started out as a young man, but Daly City is a place I've never actually lived. So that's a beginning. And it's the first real move in a plan Lyn and I started building last year, just after our first anniversary. So that's a beginning, too.

New bakery. New city. New chapter, the one we'd only ever talked about. At fifty-nine, the whole board has been reset, and I'm starting out.

Through all of it, every version of me, every chapter that began and ended, there's been one thing that never started over, because it never stopped. The camera. It has been my purpose and, on more than a few days, my best friend. It sustained me when I was down and kept me company when I was up. It's brought me as much heartache as joy, the way anything you actually love will. My wife is more that friend to me now than the camera is, and she knows it, but she also understands the camera, because she's picked one up herself. These days she's behind our DJI Osmo Pocket 4, filming for our channel, shooting the behind-the-scenes when I'm on a job. The craft that was mine alone has quietly become ours. That's its own kind of beginning, and maybe the best one.

But here's the part I didn't expect, the part that's been sitting with me all morning.

For most of my life, the photography came with a low hum of guilt underneath it. Every hour I spent on it was an hour I wasn't giving to the family business, and somewhere in the back of my head a voice would ask: why aren't you focused on the bakery? So I could never do it wholly. To pick up the camera was to take something from somewhere else, to risk letting someone down.

That voice is gone now. Not because I have less responsibility. If anything I have more. This bakery is mine. Whether it succeeds or fails comes down to me and my partners and the choices we make. But that's exactly the thing. It's mine. And somehow, the responsibility finally landing on my own shoulders is what set the camera free. I can shoot now without flinching. Without apologizing. Without that old question in the back of the room. The freedom didn't come from carrying less. It came from the weight finally being my own to carry.

So that's where I am on National Camera Day. Fifty-nine years old, standing at a crossroads, starting out in nearly every direction I look, a new bakery, a new city, a life Lyn and I are only now beginning to actually live.

And the one thing that was always mine, the thing I've carried since my father first handed it to me, I can finally hold without asking anyone's permission. Without saying sorry for loving it.

That's not a small thing to figure out at fifty-nine. But then, I'm just starting out.