Larry with the Sony VX2000

505-286-8632

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Larry Valtelhas

A snapshot history

It seems I have always been around photography and sound technology. Sometime in the early 1960s a family friend gave me a Kodak Brownie Camera. It was one of those square looking boxes with a "from the top" viewer. Every shot counted, because there were only 12 and they had to last for an entire day at the beach.

A few years later I found my way into instant photography with an inexpensive Polaroid. I recall shooting Estes rockets zooming 400 feet per second into the blue, or rather gray sky. It didn't matter. The film was black and white.

A little later, I bought a very expensive tape recorder, but not the one shown above. It was a Concord 400 stereo 7 inch reel-to-reel and the model number reflected in dollars what it cost to buy. And that was 1966 dollars! It was the size of a suitcase and weighed 40 pounds. In fact, it was a suitcase. The top came off in two pieces, each being a stereo speaker. I liked playing with special effects and it could do everything. My favorite effect was using a fan to sound like an airplane and having my friends act like news reporters at an airport. Even though jets existed, propeller driven planes were the workhorses of the sky in the mid-sixties.

In high school I bought a black and white darkroom set and sold it a few years later to my college roommate. That roommate became one of the founders of Sharpshooter Spectrum. I think I sold the darkroom after a photography major friend from the Rhode Island School of Design had me help her develop more than thirty rolls of film in one afternoon. The process in the 1970's was not automatic. It was painstakingly slow. I guess my idea of photography was not acting like a paint mixing machine.

After college I bought a Nikon and took thousands of photos. I shot my first wedding for a cousin in the late 1970s. For more than two decades I continued to play around with still photography.

That changed in 1999. I decided to take advantage of the latest digital video technology and move from silent chemical based stills to digital sound and motion photography.

In terms of recent formal training, I did some digital video non-linear editing course work at a local college and took a couple of studio production and field courses. I bought plenty of textbooks and created a personal video research library. Then, I purchased all the necessary professional equipment. Most important, I practiced the art.

I shot my first digital video wedding in 2000.

In 2003, I bought my first digital camera for professional use. I had been using PhotoShop since 1997 for image scanning, processing, and website design, so doing digital photography was a natural flow. The electronic darkroom is more productive and more interesting as an art form compared to using chemicals. Moreover, I'm happy that I can offer both photography and video services to my clients in an artistic mix that meets their needs.