Don’t you love it when you can say you’ve really buckled down and learned something new? With the profusion of information online — and when it comes to technology new and old — Youtube how-tos can be quite the resource. (Just ask me sometime about my own past small-engine mechanical ability and, well, ancient-lawnmower maintenance issues I don’t have anymore.)
For Springfield, Mo.-based Central Marketing Transport lease operator, hauling reefer freight out of the company’s Strafford, Mo., location mostly on lanes to California and back to the Ohio Valley, photography was always an interest, particularly maximizing use of manual settings fairly common in smartphone cameras to get the best possible shot the first time.
Smartphone cameras are capable of “a lot more than most people think they are,” he notes, but nonetheless he reached his own’s limitations fairly quickly. “I had a cheap digital camera and took it to its fullest extent, and still wasn’t satisfied.”
This year, for his birthday, he sold a couple custom rifles he “had laying around” and went out and bought a Nikon D5600 with a quality lens in order that he might better “capture the image” with the camera, rather than relying too much on post-shot editing, though he does do some of that in certain situations.
Watson says he’s spent “hours and hours” engrossed in how-to videos on Youtube learning what he knows today about photography (some truck maintenance, too, for that matter), and he’s taken it to a higher level in just several months since purchasing the Nikon. Before that, “I probably spent a whole month researching cameras and how to use them before I ever bought one.”
Sharing some of his images to his personal Facebook profile and linking those interested to his Flickr online storage account, he quickly began to get interest in prints — he’s since set up a Facebook page for such inquiries, he says, and canvasses around the industry for potential future freelance opportunities.
A moment on the road, well-captured.
