Keats wrote,
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness;”.
For me, this pretty much sums up photography. A photograph freezes – permanently – an instant in time. Its beauty can be forever enjoyed. A digital image is equivalent to a film negative – when printed, the moment it seized takes on not only a physical but also an emotional dimension.
I offer courses in photography for both group and private instruction, camera club & art association presentations, events, and portrait session photographic services. My artwork makes perfect favors for office soirées, destination souvenirs, graduations, confirmations, bar/bat mitzvah, and team-building tokens.
Award-winning photographer serving New England and beyond.
Master Member of the New England Camera Club Council (MNEC)
Member of Professional Photographers Association (PPA)
All images & content copyright 2010-2024 Silvana Della Camera
A bit about me. I have been holding a camera for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is of my father’s camera, a Kodak Sterling. I remember my father holding the viewfinder up to my eye. It is the camera that ignited my passion for photography. To keep my mitts off his camera, he bought me my own, a little Brownie. When I was 13, he got me a second-hand fully manual 35mm Fujica camera, an ST-701. I remember blowing through 3 rolls of film on a trip to Nova Scotia. Out of 3 rolls, 3 images registered something. After years of creating successful images on the little Brownie, my confidence went down the toilet. I cried.
But I was determined. I read the manual. I studied every word of it. Actually, I became obsessed. I needed to understand what the various knobs did and how these numbers called ISO, aperture, and shutter speed all related to each other. That camera taught me about light. It forced me to think about what I was seeing and how to capture the light. I was no longer looking to capture an interesting scene, but I was now looking at the light and dark in the frame. As a teen, I become very aware of time passing. Freezing a moment with a camera and the ability to manipulate what the camera captured by altering the shutter speed gave time a tangible existence.
Using infrared film was fascinating and at times incredibly frustrating. It added complexity to achieve the proper exposure due to the highly sensitive film. I was entranced by infrared. I still am.
Like most kids that love photography, I wanted to become a National Geographic photographer. I looked forward to the monthly editions and would spend hours poring over the beautiful images and captivating stories. I too wanted to photograph the beautiful far-off places and exquisite animals. I dreamed to document the beauty of this planet we call home.
Decades later my passion has never faltered, but my view of the world evolved.
As a lifelong astronomy lover, I tried for many years to photograph the heavens with my film camera. With the onset of digital cameras, the range of photography expanded. These sensors can see more than what film can. Thanks to these amazing digital cameras, I challenge photographers to consider that there is much more in a scene than what is visible to the human eye and to tap into the power of their cameras to discover it. Their ability to see in the dark of night, compress time with time-lapse, and see infrared make them portals to a world outside our field of vision. Photographing what the eye can’t perceive is what I love best to capture. I successfully photographed the galactic core of the Milky Way on my Nikon D810 in 2016. It was one of the most amazing experiences I ever had to see the magnificence of the heavens on the back of my camera.
Although I never became a National Geographic photographer, I do get to travel and photograph places and animals. In a way, my dream did come true. I am traveling this beautiful planet and documenting it with my camera. My images have appeared in Lighthouse Digest, Yankee Magazine, and the Boston Globe and were featured in Nikon’s 100th birthday celebration. I enjoy helping others expand their own photographic vision through photography workshops, photo walks, photo tours, private instruction, and camera club presentations on various photography topics including infrared, Milky Way, black & white, nightscapes, deep space photography, and time-lapse.
For me, this quote summarizes life and is always in the forefront of my mind:
“Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.” – from the 1958 film “Auntie Mame”.