Jee Jee Om

Hybrid Photographer (Mixing it up)

I had a lot of fun making the music videos for Amaya Rose.  She and I worked together to make her vision come to life.  She actually made her music tracks on Garage Band after we did the filming so the most difficult part was syncing her tracks to the video. 

Camera time, can’t stop this.  

1958-1962

I’ve been passionately taking pictures for as long as I can remember.  When I was 10 my dad planted a seed when he said,  “You are an artist and you have a very good eye so I think you should be a photographer”.  A couple of years later when he was working in Europe he sent me a Leica M2. He had traveled with it and used it before he gave it to me.  I was impressed because i knew it was expensive but very intimidated by this camera since my personal camera at that age was a Brownie with a flash attachment that ate up so much film and bulbs because I loved shooting with it.  My mom had a Polaroid which I was not allowed to use.

1963-1967

Later my dad sent me a Hasselblad which I broke or it was already broken and my mom would not pay to have it repaired.  I don’t even know what happened to that camera.  I wasted a lot of film in the beginning using the Leica, but eventually mastered it - or so I thought.

1968-1972

When I went away to college in 1968 I bought my first Canon 35mm SLR, leaving the "old fashioned" Leica rangefinder at home in the attic - don’t know what happened to it either.  I could sell it today on Ebay for over a grand. Since then it seems that I would end up buying new equipment each time my camera was  either stolen, lost or broken. 

1973-1980

From 1972 to 2000 I owned mostly Nikon or Canon. My husband told me that I wasted film on people and I told him that he wasted film on scenery, “You can buy the post cards”, I would tell him.  My pictures ended up in print and his ended up on slides in those square little boxes that no one ever looked at again.  I was a minister’s wife so I was the official wedding photographer.  I usually bought the rolls of film as a gift and then handed the unprocessed film over to the newly married couple without ever seeing what I had shot.  Sounds crazy - since now we can see each picture before during and after taking it and even send it via wifi right over to their smartphone. Whew!

1981-1990

I got into videography with a Panasonic camcorder when my children were growing up.  This camera was amazing and tough enough that the kids could make their Barbie movies - they did some amazing in-camera edits with it.   Later it went snow boarding until it was stolen when 10 years old and still working great. Someone in the family still has 100’s of those little cassette tapes with no way to view them.

1991-2000

I always had some type of video camera, but got more serious about videography in 2002 with one of the first Canon GL2s which did broadcast quality video and 2 megapixel stills.  I had a lot of fun with that camera until loaning it to a daughter who returned it damaged after filming a TV travel show with it in Hawaii and Australia.  Hey, she owes me!

2001-2012

I was still using a Canon film camera in 2000 when it was stolen just before I was to go on a European vacation so I decided to buy my first digital camera.  When I had to choose between the more professional DSLR or point and shoot model I choose the latter because it was so much smaller and lighter for travel.  I’ve been using digital ever since and loving it so much, although after a trip to England I bought my first very expensive DSLR so that I had all the creative controls that I was so used to.  When that camera broke 3 years ago at the end of warranty, I did a lot of research and decided to go with the new Micro Four Thirds System with the Panasonic Gh3 and Gh4 cameras.  There are two main reasons that I chose this system - one was the small size and the other was the superior stills and video that you can get out of the same camera.

2013-Today

Now with this new Micro Four Thirds System it is just unbelievable to me what I can do with one little camera - well I actually have 3 of them.  I can do a 3 camera shoot with two people and a tripod.  I used to do a “two camera shoot” with one camera and one person.  Hmm.   And all that rendering that I had to do years ago with the GL2 is no more. I can really appreciate what my Imac and Final Cut Pro X can do for me.  

Hybrid Photography - Mixing it Up

I have always loved to mix stills with video.  Now it has a name, they call it “hybrid photography” and it has never been easier than with this system.  I can carry 4 cameras, 7 lenses, extra batteries, and 2 microphones in 2 camera bags with a tripod all by myself. Unbelievable!  (I don’t have to because I have a husband), but I can do it because now he has to carry the drone (quadcopter) - you know that flying contraption that does your aerial photography.

Besides loving to capture pictures and video there is one other passion and that is the editing  part. I absolutely love the challenge and the creative arts of the editing process.  It’s something that takes a lot of patience which I have (I was an elementary school teacher), a lot of time (I'm retired),  and also I am a perfectionist (I was an interior designer) so that makes me persistent to keep at it until it's just what I want.  I also was a restaurant manager and a veterinary hospital manager so I love to take pictures of food and pets - just thought I’d add.

I’m just happy that this technology came along in my life time so that I can take the millions and millions or terabytes and terabytes of pictures that I want to take.  And I hope that in the future someone will find them in the cloud and want to look at some of them - otherwise I’m just doing all this silent snapping for myself, but that’s okay.

 I have a large collection of the old technology cameras of yesterday which I still highly respect and love experimenting with the old film cameras. It’s just becoming more difficult to find places to develop your film now and even more expensive than it was years ago.