Mirror selfie where I should have moved the drill battery.

Earlier this year I bought this little camera that I didn’t know would change my life. It started off as just shifting my approach to photography, but turned into so much more. It changed how I felt about all art.

“Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” ~ Peter Adams

I stumbled into becoming a professional commercial photographer. I started my own business (bearskn.com) and slowly just bought more gear and figured out how to properly photograph our product and do lifestyle shoots. It started off because I had taken a few photography classes in college and I had shot a lot of skateboarding with my friends. I had shot a bit with my stepdad’s Canon T2i, then I bought a Canon 7D off a friend when we launched the brand. Long story short, I was always looking to get better and the goal of many of my photos was seeking perfection. Perfect lighting, perfect exposure, in focus, and most importantly accurate color. This was product photography so it needed to be accurate for the website. I have spent hours editing photos and making them as perfect as I can. Then I tried a CampSnap camera which goes against everything I was doing with photography.

Campsnap is one of those products that popped up in my Instagram feed a while back. It’s a basic digital camera that looks and feels like the old disposable cameras I shot with as a kid. Disposable cameras were my personal entry point into photography. I didn’t have access to a real camera when I was a kid so we would buy those disposable ones and snap photos of friends at school, at the skate park or on vacation. Then afterwards would go and get them developed. This camera perfectly captures this experience. It’s super wide frame, the only features it has is the shutter/on off button and a switch to turn the flash on or off as well as a photo count. But that’s it. It's really simple and clean design. Its light fits in my pocket. The CampSnap has no screen.

On commercial shoots — I usually just direct now — we shoot tethered to a large monitor so I can see a big version of what is being shot in real time. This allows me to check focus and give better direction to the models or photographer. The Campsnap camera has no screen. I can't see what the photo is until I offload it later. This is a big part of the charm. I don’t sweat it, I just shoot and hope for the best. It is about capturing moments. Something beautiful about my favorite images is how they can be impossible to recreate. The camera has a little bit of a delay, so I don’t always get the moment I wanted. It has almost a mind of its own. It also has a timeout shutoff. Sometimes I take too long to get it turned on and the photo I had planned had passed, then I find something new.

My favorite Neon sign in Portland, haven't stayed there yet because I can't sleep with bed bugs.

The way it changed how I thought about things. I had previously been seeking perfection with my photos, now I seek inspiration. The campsnap camera flips things for me. My favorite photos are the ones that are often the least perfect. Have the most flaws. I love when they are slightly out of focus or there is a bit of a blur. I think this is also because my phone can now take such close to perfect photos, it makes them a bit boring now. The imperfections make it art. I am taking photos that I could never really recreate. It's truly capturing moments, authentic moments. I have ideas for photos, I snap them and forget. I get this wonderful experience later seeing what happens. Often the ones I didn’t put much thought into become some of my favorite ones.

This experience was not easy for me. At first I would look at the photos I took and hate them all. I was like these suck! They are grainy, blurry, many out of focus, but over time I really appreciated the mess. It taps into my nostalgia of shooting as a kid. The messiness is human, I really love it. Sometimes I accidentally take a photo as I’m pulling it out of my pocket or it's still in my pocket and I get some weird dark photo. To look and find the beauty in that is such a fun experience. It reminds me so much of comedy. Comedy is about finding something often in the mundane.

A lesson I learned in improv class was that comedy comes from the mistakes, not from doing the scene perfectly. We would play this game of catch, but the object was that nobody was to actually catch the pretend ball. The way people in the class would miss or get creative in how they acted when they missed was everything. It was such a simple thing to create laughs. It was in the mistakes that the comedy happens. If we all just caught the imaginary ball every time perfectly it was less interesting.

Testing my reflux with late night Pizza and Pellegrino. .

The path to mastery in anything has 4 stages.

1. Unconscious Incompetence – I’ve never done it and I don’t know about how to do it and I can’t really do it.

2. Conscious Incompetence – I know what I need to do but I can’t do it.

3. Conscious Competence – I know what I need to do and I can do it. I have to think about it to make it happen.

4. Unconscious Competence – I just can do it, it feels natural or like an extension. I don’t have to think about it, it just happens.

My dog opening his ears for once in his life.

I can’t discount all the time I spent learning and practicing photography before I started shooting with this camera. In my hands, a seemingly thoughtless photo tends to be very good because I have developed a feel for what could make an interesting image. I understand lighting and composition so much that I don’t really think about it consciously. For me, the camera illustrated my unconscious competence I have from the hours of shooting and editing photos. This experience changed my approach to comedy. Before I was trying to make all my jokes perfect and lean. Use all these techniques and rules I had learned about what to do and not to do. This is kind of a different approach. I guess I am to that point where I know the rules so now I can break them. I have begun to approach anything that I previously took as a “rule” and how I can do the opposite. How can I make that work. The campsnap method is to approach it without fear. Get back to that innocent time where I just would try stuff to see what worked and what didn’t work. Let the joke decide what it was. I almost feel like I need to get out of the way so it can just be.

In an era of so much AI there is something inherently valuable about hand made art. We have come so far with technology in cameras that it’s become boring. It is so fun to find an appreciation for the things that came before. With the invention of the aluminum tubes of paint it made painting more accessible, the disposable camera made photography more accessible. Now my cellphone camera can capture more colors than the human eye can detect. This does not mean the previous thing has less value, in fact to me it has more.

I hoped you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to my blog and share it with someone who would appreciate it!

Thank you for reading, you’re doing great.

Bjorn RG.

If you want to get your own campsnap camera here is my link: campsnapphoto.com/skatecub

Use offer code: skatecub At checkout for $5 off your first order.

How a camera changed the way I think about art.