I’ve been a professional photographer for more than two decades now. But before any of that, before the Navy, before WIRED, before NASA, before I knew what aperture or shutter speed meant, there was this camera.
A bright green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles point-and-shoot from 1990.
A gift from my uncle when I was about 5 years old.
It was the first camera I ever owned. It’s also the worst camera I own: plastic lens, fixed focus, no meaningful exposure control, and a tiny Michelangelo photo bomb stamped into every frame.
So…I took it to New York to see if I could make a good photograph with it.
At first, I thought the project was going to be a fun camera test. A professional photographer revisiting his childhood camera and trying to make something decent with it.
But the more I worked on it, the less it felt like a test.
The limitations forced me to stop thinking so much. I could only choose where to stand, what to point it at, and when to press the shutter.
Which, as it turns out, is still most of photography.
In the end, the project became less about whether the camera could make a good photograph, and more about why some photographs are worth keeping at all.
Thanks to Warren Harold, Luna Posadas Nava, Dane Turner, Heidi Lavelle, Daniel Tohill, Bill Stafford, and of course Chris Gibbons for helping bring this to life.