Issue link: https://imageup.uberflip.com/i/1495672
| Four Seasons Hemet Herald | APRIL 2023 | 25 THE CREATIVE SPOTLIGHT: SHERYL COOLEY I fell in love with photography when I was nine years old. We were visiting a relative who pulled out a monster Kodak Polaroid camera to take a family picture. Seconds later, I was staring at a moment captured for perpetuity with a simple click of a button. I wanted to do that. I started with my mother's old Brownie and shot thousands of pics with a series of Instamatics. When I was 15, my father – a man who never, ever spent a dime on anything that was not a necessity – bought me my first "good" camera, a Yashica twin lens reflex. Today I shoot with a Nikon D500. As with other hobbies, photography took a back seat during my working years; I didn't even own a DSLR until I retired. I used to shoot birds, but as I've aged, I've found that schlepping around eight to 10 pounds of cameras, lenses, and equipment is beyond me. So I've switched to flowers. Like birds, they seldom sit still (unless I'm shooting indoors), but they don't fly away, either. In the "olden" days, photography classes concentrated heavily on darkroom technique. I begged Dad to build me a darkroom in the basement. In the interim, I used our main bath. One day I developed a roll of film, left it to wash in the sink with the water running, and completely forgot about it. It flooded the bathroom, ruined the carpet (we had carpeting in the kitchen back then, too!), and ran into the clothes closet in the basement, ruining, among other things, my mother's fur coat. There were no further discussions about a darkroom anywhere near the house. These days photos are digital, and I have a love/hate relationship with Photoshop. I had the fortune of having well known photographer Karen Hutton critique what I thought were my ten best photos at PhotoshopWorld East in 2019. She was kind but not enthusiastic. She forced me to up my game. Today I push for images that capture light, awe, joy, warmth, delight, and/or contentment, something of beauty that "feels more than just what you see." I have only recently begun to print and frame my work, and it has been displayed here at The Lodge and at the local Hemet art gallery. It's a whole new chapter in my life, and I am loving it!