About | steve malley

The Camera Diaries

My first camera was a Canon FTB, purchased in 1975 for a journalism class at Ohio State.

What do I remember? Tri X film, darkroom fumes, manual focus, blurry images.

I'm a convert to digital and now shoot with a Canon 5d Mk4 and (mirrorless) Canon R5.

Pixels, auto-focus, face recognition and Photoshop are magic dust.

My camera bag is the first bag packed for a trip: two bodies, three lenses, memory cards, chargers, computer.

The bag is heavy.

My iPhone camera will never replace the R5.

I'm old school, rarely shoot video.

Photos on a wall tell stories to a room.

Our house in Connecticut is full of stories and photos.

My wife, son and I split time between Sharon and Bronxville.

We fantasize about spending more time in Sharon.

I have a tractor, for mowing the field and moving rocks. That's important.

The list of places we want to visit dwarfs the list of places we've seen.

In a heartbeat, I'm taking my cameras back to Rome, the Inca Trail, Umbria, Barcelona, the Col du Galibier (on a bike), Sugar Beach in Costa Rica, San Francisco, London, Denmark. And of course baseball fields anywhere.

Creating a photo book of my son's LL Baseball season was rewarding. And humbling. We have copies in every room.

A photograph cannot be created in Photoshop. That's art.

I miss the darkroom. I do not miss manual focus.

I've never regretted taking a photo. I've often regretted not taking one.

— Steve Malley