I went to a one-day class to learn how to
process film, but I never studied photography. I learned the process from a
friend who had made his own darkroom. Since the process is simple, you only
need to be taught once to remember it. But, you only become good through
repetition. When taking photos, anyone might feel the gap between what you felt
when the photo was taken and what the finished product became, but I hadn’t
even developed that baseline at the time, and I didn’t really understand what
quality was. There’s not a clear path which I followed to learn, but I repeated
the processed of looking more at photos of other photographers, taking photos, printing
them, and viewing the finished prints over and over. I think I finally started
to pay attention to the expression of photos themselves three or four years
after I started photography. Even so, I never thought
of asking people to critique my photographs, even at the start of my
career. I was simply interested in shooting and trying
to present them to the public.