Kenneth Hendricks

In the immortal words of Lewis Hine, “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.” I received a Kodak Instamatic 110 camera (and some flash cubes!) for Christmas one year. I must have been about 10 or 12 years old. I took some photos occasionally but never really got too excited about photography until I got my first "real" camera (a Canon AE-1) when I was in high school. I took a lot of photographs and wasted a considerable amount of film and money in the next few years. Unfortunately my choice in cameras (and laziness) led to not really learning much about the "nuts and bolts" of photography and I used the automatic settings almost exclusively. I still got some nice photos now and then but I really wanted to learn how to do it right and have more control over the process. It was time to get serious! My solution was to buy a camera that didn't have automatic settings at all. That was a real step up and it made me learn the things I needed to know to take my photography to the next level. Eventually I put together a darkroom in my basement and there was no stopping me! When the great migration from film to digital happened (at least for most of us), I went out and bought the Olympus C 3030z camera the day it came out. Three megapixels for a thousand dollars? Oh yeah! Having my darkroom on my desktop? Unbelievable! Along the way, I've tried about every form of photography that there is, from astrophotography to stereo (3D) photography to cinematography. It's a wonderful creative outlet that gets me out of the house but it’s something that I can enjoy at home, too. I've avoided still photography as a profession (while enjoying a career in television) because I just have too much fun with it. When it comes to photography, I guess you could say that I have quite the passion for this wonderful distraction.