Chris Benabise Photography

My photographic journey started in January of 2018 when the woman that I love and now call my beautiful bride was in the hospital with Colon Cancer. We thought she wasn’t going to make it.  She always loved seeing my photos that I was taking with my phone and always made comments that I should take photography more seriously. I would brush off what she was saying because I thought that I had TIME to worry about that later in life.  With her going into the hospital I felt as if time was short and I should just pick up my camera/phone and run with it.   

After we knew that she was going to be ok I decided that I was just going to dive in head first to help her heal, and help me heal my heart through photography.   The photo above is the first image that I took at the moment that I knew that I was going to be a photographer.  I was trying my best at telling the story of Chris and Kris.  This was the start of a wonderful path moving forward.  Yes, it was going to be a hard one and a long one for us.  I started shooting everything from landscapes, portraits of birds, to the pipes in the alley behind the building that we lived in.  It was fun learning different ways of shooting photos. I miss those days because it was new to me, and a thrill of just shooting was driving me to move forward with my photography.  I remember going on short walks in the middle of the day shooting the birds flying around downtown and the plant life.   

The joy of walking around the neighborhood just snapping image after image was so much for me at the time.  The image above was the first photo I took that got real traction on a Facebook page that I still post to till this day.  When I took the image I was going off my gut feeling that it looked cool to me and that is why I was taking it.  It was then I decided to get better equipment, so I bought a Canon bridge camera which gave me a whole new way of looking at the world. I loved the freedom this camera gave me and it allowed me to take different types of images than what my phone gave me.  I still take photos with my phone today, but its just for snapshots of the kids for my memories to help me stay connected with my little ones.    

Above is the first image that I ever printed after buying my first DSLR. I decided to print 10 of them, and gave them to the people who inspired me to keep shooting. I thought that I was King Shit with my Nikon d3000 that I bought at a pawn shop for $80 bucks.  This was the start of me really learning how take an image not just a snapshot. Oh man, did that start some fun times for sure I was even taking photos of my reflection in the windows because it looked cool.  While doing this I noticed some shots of the Milky Way On line and I was drawn into learning how to shoot that style of photography.  The real trick that I had to learn was how to get focus on the stars.  Then I learned you need more than just stars in the photo.  Below is one of the first images that I took trying to light up some sort of rock in the foreground while getting the stars.  I soon learned that you need to do a heck of a lot more to an image once you capture the night sky.  

After really studying the art of post processing, I learned that you need to get a really good computer to help make the images really pop.  So I bought a laptop at a  pawnshop for cheap again, but sadly it was not powerful enough to get the look I wanted for my Milky Way images.   Below is the laptop that I bought, and it would last me for the next two years.  I also bought my first brand new Canon Rebel t6.  Oh man, I thought I was the shit at this point (not really but I thought I was).  I started down the path of shooting with Canon gear, and I bought myself a 35-70mm lens thinking that it would help. Boy howdy I was wrong, I still didn’t know what was needed for a photograph, I was just going by my gut feeling.  

I got knocked down a peg or two by a local photographer.  He taught me that in order to be a photographer I needed to learn more about composition and how to really put all the elements of a photo together.  Below is the image I took that day.  It hit me that I needed to really learn more about how to edit an image.  You see, Shaun Peterson was really hard on me that day but it was for the best because it showed me that I was in fact not that good of a photographer.  I didn’t pick up my camera for a month because I had some soul searching to do.  I started really studying how to put the elements of a good image together to really draw a viewer in.  

I was starting to really learn how to blend images together and I had another photographer really kick my ass in a critique.  They showed me that I was blowing out the highlights, and just making a mess of my images with the colors.  I needed to change how I processed my work, and it took almost a year for me to learn that lesson.  I have met so many people on my journey that I now call friends.  Kyle Clearly and I started to go shooting together, and it taught us so much about how to take a photo. He and I were on the same track, and it  started a friendship that I am going to keep for life.   The image below is the one I took the first time that Kyle and I went out to shoot. (See the colors are way off and I had a lot to learn haha).  The one thing that I have learned on this photographic journey is learning never stops.  I love that aspect of photography because it has helped me grow as a person.  This blog is the start of a new chapter in my photographic journey. Thanks for reading and enjoy from Casper y’all.