It’s hard to predict how passions will evolve over the course of a lifetime – or many lifetimes. Dave Highbloom’s lifelong passion for photography, which Dave inherited from his parents, was enhanced and transformed by the birth of his own children, and has continued to transform as his children have grown and matured.
You could say that Dave was born into photography; his mother collected old-fashioned box cameras, and his father worked in advertising and had a deep understanding of the power of a good image. In his youth, Dave devoted uncounted hours to capturing, developing, and printing photographs in a quest for the perfect shot. He would spend days at a time arranging a scene, then hours more in a dark room developing the negatives in just the right way. Dave didn’t realize how much deeper his interest in photography could go… until he had children of his own.
When he became a father, Dave suddenly had subjects who he wanted to capture on film at nearly every moment. Even better, these subjects weren’t very mobile – and Dave could make them do anything he wanted! Having adorable, obedient models available at all times spurred a new phase in Dave’s photography. This phase centered on tightly controlled, highly crafted scenes involving his family; during this period, Dave’s family was well known for their exceptional holiday cards.
As Dave’s children grew older and matured out of their willingness to play dress-up with dad, Dave’s passion for the image entered a yet another new phase: action photography. By lucky chance, Dave’s children’s adolescence coincided with the most exciting technological changes in photographic equipment in over a century. From the ubiquity of mobile phone cameras to the breathtaking possibilities of drones and action cams, the past two decades have brough an explosion in camera formats and capabilities that opened up entirely new avenues for Dave’s passion.
These new technologies meant that nearly every moment of Dave’s children’s lives could be captured in some format; suddenly, Dave found himself following his kids down snowboarding runs toting multiple generations of GoPro, using a drone to capture spectacular shots of wakeboarding stunts, and submerging with a digital SLR in a waterproof enclosure to document snorkeling adventures. Like Dave’s relationship to the artform itself, the nature of Dave’s pictures transformed as a result of this technological shift: Dave’s photography became less about the composition and quality of a single image, and more about telling a story.
Just as Dave’s parents imparted their love of the printed picture to their son, so has Dave imparted his passion for the image to his own children. One of Dave’s sons, who is still only in high school, runs his own business capturing aerial photographs for realtors using drones. The technology may have gotten a few generations newer, but Dave’s son’s drones would feel right at home in Dave’s mother’s old box camera collection. The apple truly hasn’t fallen far from the tree – in either generation.