Art Happens Between Heartbeats

Many years ago, I got a message from a friend who had just gotten her first digital camera. She said she’d long admired my photography and thought of me as a photographer, but she couldn’t think of herself as a “real photographer” because she was using a digital camera and digital tools. She acknowledged the mental acrobatics because she also knew I was using a digital camera and digital tools, and yet she still thought of me as a “real photographer.” Imposter syndrome at its worst.

I got my first 35mm point-and-shoot Kodak shell camera when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. My dad, also a photographer, helped me learn to load and unload film. He showed me how to take it in and fill out a developer drop at the local market. Then he sat with me through my first few batches of photos and told me how to improve the framing, line of sight, depth of field, rule of thirds, and so on. Because I was using a point-and-shoot, there was no way to adjust for light or speed, but he helped me understand how to find the best lighting available and how to get ahead of a moving target to lessen blur.

I took that camera everywhere, but I was also a kid, and film was $2.50 a roll, then another $3–4 to develop. So, I was limited in my practice by my babysitting budget. Aside from the times he let me play with his cameras, I didn’t get to use a manual 35mm until college. Even then, I took one semester of photography prior to dropping out.

My dad was a solid Canon fan, but he also used a Pentax and a Minolta. In fact, the only time he let me shoot with the Pentax was during my divorce, when I was heartbroken and barely able to get out of bed while recovering at his house in Cedar City. He came in one morning and told me to get up. I was going to use the Pentax, and we were going for a drive to find something beautiful to capture on film.

I rallied. We loaded the van with snacks and set out toward the mountains.

We found a spot up in the pass with patches of snow and a half-frozen brook. As he always did, he gasped and pulled over. “The light is just right. Hurry.”

We spilled out of the van, grabbed camera bags, and trudged through the snow to a little picnic area. He reminded me to take all the photos we needed from a distance before we made tracks in the snow below us. Then he pulled the Pentax out and let me hold it.

I never knew why it was his favorite. He rarely used it, preferring his Canon or Minolta. But whenever I asked to use the Pentax, he handed me a different camera instead. So I gathered he was trying to perk me up from heartbreak by bribing me with the camera I always wanted to try.

He stood off to my side as I lined up my shot. He talked the whole time about light, framing, and holding my breath for the perfect click. Then he said, “The perfect shot comes between your heartbeats. Even the beating of your heart can move your hand and take the shot from you. Just like with a gun—it’s the same with a camera. They are both tools that operate between heartbeats. Choose your frame. You will always see beauty differently than I see beauty. We can be looking at exactly the same thing and your eye will see something my eye can’t see. Trust your eye, not mine. When you trust your eye, take the shot between heartbeats.”

And I did.

With my father’s camera, we played in the snow and took photos until we ran out of film. Then we talked about heartbreak and healing all the way home.

When I bought my first professional digital camera at age twenty-six, my dad and I came to some hard words—not because I had gone digital, but because I had chosen a Nikon. He took offense to the brand I’d picked, like I’d somehow thumbed my nose at all he’d taught me by not choosing a Canon digital camera. The choice was simple, though, because Nikon had the best resolution at the time and the easiest post-edit tools to use and manage. The body was compact, included a flip-out video screen, and was state of the art for its day.

That year I took more than 14,000 digital images on my BlissQuest drive around the country—the equivalent of 583 rolls of film. I learned by having immediate access to the image so I could study what worked and what didn’t, adjust my shutter speed and aperture, and get real-time results to understand what I was doing wrong or right. Traditionally, I would have had to try to remember or write down the settings I’d used on a 35mm and then wait to have the film developed to see whether I’d gotten the result I wanted—usually I hadn’t.

My dad was so skeptical about the technology that we had a shoot-off. We drove out to Dixie National Park in southern Utah, where the red sandstone cliffs and brush made amazing images no matter what you were shooting with. We stopped at several locations, drew a box in the dirt, and took turns standing inside it and photographing the landscapes with our cameras: his trusty Canon 35mm and my digital Nikon. I wasn’t even using a DSLR at the time. On the way back to his house, we stopped at the one-hour developer shop, then went out for milkshakes while we waited for his film to develop.

Once we got home and placed the images side by side—his prints against my laptop screen—he sat back, blown away.

We talked for hours about the pros and cons of the learning curve, understanding the work that goes into the craft, the importance of documenting life, and the power of having a tool that lessens the time it takes to master an art form—if mastery is even achievable. We talked until the middle of the night.

The next morning over breakfast, he said, “You always had an eye for the shot. The scene was always something you just understood. But after taking thousands of photos, you’ve sharpened that in about half the time it would have taken others because of the immediate feedback loop and the lower cost of not purchasing film or development. People wanting to take photos are limited by cost and turnaround time. Now they’ll master scenes and shots so much faster.”

He nodded over his bacon and finished, “I hope film cameras don’t go away. I hope film lives on in its own craft and beauty—but I can see so much power and beauty in this new tool and how it makes this expensive craft more affordable and accessible that I hope it doesn’t go away either. Art is in the eye of the beholder—whether they’re clicking the shutter or staring at the finished portrait on the wall.”
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W.C. Nielson on the Stan Stephens Cruise, Valdez Alaska August 1996.

In a recent visit to my father in hospice, he rallied enough to get up and move around. I’d brought my DSLR camera hoping to show him, but I realized the body would be too heavy for his frail arms to hold, even without the lens. So I ran down to the store and grabbed a disposable Kodak point-and-shoot because it was lighter and more nostalgic.

He was able to walk outside with us into the sunlight. He can’t remember now that I’m his daughter, or even what my name is, but when I put the camera in his hands, he adjusted his posture, aimed at a flower, tilted to adjust for the light, and held his breath as he always did just before a shutter click. Then he turned to me and said—to the daughter he can’t remember—“I lined the shot to go from here… then topped it here.” He motioned to the frame he’d snapped, and then he smiled.

It was a moment captured between heartbeats.

I left the camera with him at the hospice center so he could take the remaining photos if the mood struck him. Then I wept the thirteen-hour drive home.

Twenty years ago, when those early digital camera conversations took place, cameras in phones weren’t really a thing yet. Once Apple launched the iPhone camera and the technology rapidly evolved, everyone could take professional-level photos. And it’s been wonderful.

Then, as post-edit tools improved, filters and modifications also made the art of photography more accessible, easier to use, cheaper, and more efficient.

There was a brief social outcry about all the developer booths that would disappear, the jobs that would be lost, the film studios that would go out of business, and all the professional photographers who would supposedly be pushed out of work by these new tools that made photographers out of everyone with a phone. People wouldn’t have to pay to learn, pay a professional to take images, or pay for marketing shots—they could do it themselves for cheap or free. Digital tools, presets, pre-made filters, and in-app modification functions made it possible for anyone with a smartphone to cut out multiple middlemen, services, and costs to get the image they wanted.

Legacy film companies filed for bankruptcy, unable to change with the times fast enough. Servicing a 35mm now can be a challenge because there are fewer shops with people who know how to repair or clean analog cameras properly.

Is the 35mm craft dead? No. I still see people with old cameras often, but it’s a costly hobby to learn and maintain. Do I still love film? Absolutely. While it’s harder now to tell the difference between a 35mm image and a digital image, there are still quality print differences. And storage longevity for film is entirely different.

But back to my friend who got her first digital camera and couldn’t think of herself as a “real photographer.” I think my answer was something along the lines of: You are still the one pointing the camera. You are still the one taking the shot. If you’re using filters or post-image tools, you are still the one making those decisions and shaping the photo to your creative vision. Your art is not defined by how others think art should be. It’s defined by your process.

What I hope she took from it was what I took from my father’s teachings about photography—the art of writing with light.

Making art happens between your heartbeats.

It’s the choice, or series of choices, that defines your intent and vision. The tool is only a tool. According to my father, that tool could be a Kodak, a Pentax, or a loaded gun. The machinery and objects, the light and the aperture, are all subject to the decisions you capture in the shutter click. Art to other people is what they personally take or feel from the experience. Art is two-sided: the creator and the experiencer.

Dad and I had a lot of long, rambling existential conversations about that topic over the decades. Sometimes we’d start a conversation about it, then it would drop off and pick up five years later when we both had more lived experience to bring to it. As life and art often do.

Art will persist somehow, some way. Inspiration cannot be stopped. It’s the viral spread of emotional need—to create, to make, to express. Inspiration does not care if it has a platform or followers. It simply must be. Art doesn’t care whether the image is digital or film, ink or written in blood.

The creator cares. The experiencer cares.
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That caring is the space between heartbeats.

You can learn more about my father, Craig, and the W.C. Nielson Heritage Program at Elder Glade Publishing.