Who is Jeffrey Betro and why is he taking pictures? It all goes back to a photo I took many years ago when I was little with what was likely a very inexpensive camera that was surely not taken care of very well (well before cell phones). But the result of the picture always stuck with me and has unknowingly inspired my interest in photography and photo editing ever since.
This is it, the unedited with no color correction picture of the Niagara Falls whirlpool, with is blue water and cable car running across the river at the perfect spot. It almost looked like a picture off one of the postcards you could buy in the shops there and I was proud of it. But it wouldn’t be until high school newspaper that I really realized that I had an eye for composing a picture and then doing all the post processing necessary to make it stand out.
I fell in love with computers in the early 90’s which naturally put me in a position to become the main computer layout and photo editing guru for the high school newspaper staff. I became very knowledgeable of Photoshop and QuarkXPress and began to get creative with the pictures I was receiving to use, editing, adjusting, correcting, even completely reorganizing them in Photoshop to make them fit the page or story they were meant to go with. But then I got my hands on our Canon EOS SLR and took pictures at various sporting events, using the knowledge of how it would get edited into the page and the ideas I had that would make for a good shot. Oftentimes I went out of my way to get the rights to take the pictures but not write the article just so I could get some more camera time.
Once I graduated high school, I unfortunately left it all behind me as I went to study computer science. During my college years, I appropriately ended up selling cameras at Best Buy because they were short staffed and the computer department was overstaffed. Even though I was surrounded by cameras, I still wasn’t able to get into it as I was purely focused on computer programming and getting a good job out of college.
After college, we all got drug into the dreaded camera on our phones that never took a decent shot without a lot of effort and stable hands. My career was in software and web site development, and I never had enough time and spare change to pick up a quality camera and actually practiced manually setting focus, aperture, etc. But ten years later, I finally purchased my very own DSLR, a Canon T6i with an 18-135mm lens, to get started down the road of tuning my eye and getting a better feel for adjusting the camera to take a perfect shot.
Now I am sharing some of the photos I take, along with my love of food and nature with whoever is interested. I hope you enjoy what you see, and feel free to contact me via the site if you have any suggestions or feedback!