About CJ Villa Photography
Prehistory
I started photography when I was 15, with a twin lens reflex camera of uncertain make and vintage. It was a camera my father had
as a boy, if I'm not mistaken. That camera was stolen out of my college dorm room. For some reason I felt I needed to replace it,
and at that moment I became a photographer. I bought a Yashica MAT and moved on. The school darkroom was where I taught myself to develop
black-and-white film and use an enlarger to create prints.
San Francisco
When I moved to San Francisco, that roll film camera went with me. At that time virtually all "serious" photography was black-and-white. Nonetheless I began to work with color, got a Minolta SLR,
and never really looked back. Eventually I moved up to a Nikon F3, shooting slide film and developing my own Cibachrome prints.
Hawaii
On a vacation to the Big Island, it struck me that I could as easily live there as visit. So off I went, and spent
the next 12 years there. There are few more photographic -- or more photographed -- places on earth. I continued to work with
color slide film, but instead of printing Cibachromes, began to use a Nikon scanner with Adobe Photoshop. Eventually I
obtained a 1 megapixel Nikon digital camera. For the next few years I used both color film (scanned) and purely digital media.
Now
My equipment is completely digital, though I still have the Nikon film cameras. I expect I will again begin to mix in color film. The differences
between film and digital are quite pronounced, and I am not yet convinced that digital totally replaces film.
Living in the mountains of the American Southwest has created a new set of visual opportunities.
Certain images in our world still move me. When I see them, I can feel them. That's when I take a photograph.
It may take me just a moment or two, or an hour.