My photography work in the past four years has taken me all over New Mexico, and now it is expanding into Arizona where I get the chance to check out more small towns, like Seligman, Arizona. This town is credited with being the birthplace of Route 66. It might be funny to think how a tiny town without a single stoplight would start the first great traveling road in the U.S. Of course, like all Route 66 towns, the hey day of Seligman is long past, but I still enjoy trying to listen and hear an echo of what once was
My first visit to Carlsbad Caverns was all the way back in 2000 during my first attempt to move to California. I have two standout memories from that visit. The first was that it was on a weekday in March with no school groups and the caverns were virtually empty and it was doubly amazing to have them essentially all to myself. The second memory was dropping my (film) camera into the toilet in the visitor center! Fast forward to 2021 and the caverns were filled with few people using the recommended whisper voice, and my camera was digital and mirrorless, and I did not even dare take it into the restroom!
Well, somehow I have made it 12 years as a full-time professional photographer. Like most businesses, it has not been a smooth, linear progression going ever upward, but rather a roller coaster. Jason Collin Photography as an official licensed business started in June 2009. However, I was first paid for photography in 2008 when I still lived in Tokyo, Japan. In 2009, having returned to Florida, circumstances convinced me I needed to create my own job, and I made the bold leap into being a full-time photographer immediately, no keeping a part-time job or anything.
I had the opportunity to present the story of how I became a professional photographer at 1 Million Cups this week here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was a chance for me to really think about what was the start of my path to becoming a professional photographer. I realized it began back in 2001, on a trip to Thailand and Cambodia. I invite you to watch the video below to hear the full story. I begin presenting just a couple minutes into the video.
If anyone asks me how did I learn photography, I tell them, by walking the streets of Tokyo for hundreds of hours with my very first DSLR camera, a Nikon D80. What is great about living in a city with wide spread public transportation is you can take a train to one area, walk randomly to where your eyes take you, then just hop on another train and get back home without having to worry about returning to where your car is parked. This is how I went about finding one of my more famous photos, at least in Japan, which I titled, “Last Green Leaves Before Autumn.” I submitted it to Metropolis Magazine (the largest weekly English magazine in Japan) and they featured it in the Photo of the Week section. Picking up a copy of the magazine the Friday afternoon it came out and seeing my photo featured inside, I was stunned and even stopped strangers passing by to say (in English), “that’s my photo!” It was a moment of exhileration I have rarely ever felt again.
Slab City. It was a mysterious place floating in my mind for decades, ever since seeing Easy Rider. In my memory the movie showed Slab City as a place in California you can just setup and live, on empty slabs of concrete out in the desert. In preparing to go to Slab City recently, I read up some about it. It was supposedly still a lawless place where the police did not go, and were not wanted. I was actually concerned about safety issues trying to just drive through Slab City. I expected to be met with very unwelcome looks, as an outsider. Slab City, I thought, is not a place for casual visitors.
Driving back to Albuquerque after a weekend of rural land real estate photographer in Angel Fire along the very scenic Route 66, one can find amongst an unbroken stretch of canyon, trees and river a place that very much stands out, the Johnnie Meier Classical Gas Pump Museum. Thanks to Atlas Obscura, a great website for finding strange and odd things, we knew to be on the lookout for it. There are not just old gas pumps, but any number of things from a past that is slowly being forgotten. For me seeing the old coin operated animal rides that I used to take in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a strong shot of nostalgia. Even the old cigarette machine jogged my memory to when you used to see them in every restaurant waiting room. And when was gas only 32¢ cents a gallon last?
