At first I had a Sony Mavica with those little and not so useful diskettes. Then I quickly “upgraded” to a professional manual camera Ricoh.
I started taking pictures and after showing them to some friends, one of them (Claudia María) tells me “you should take the pictures for the catalog we are working on“.
It was a collection of some about the monuments in Guatemala, I decided to try and there I go… The camera payed for itself in half a week. I charged US$390 for the package of several pictures being sold to one big newspaper on my country.
Lucky me because not so often you get that kind of payment (I realized that after 6 months of work)… It is not so common to start like this so I feel blessed.
To the right is one of my first pictures: Cristobal Colon at Avenida las Américas.
The ugly story behind this 
I was being punished by the sun that day. I took a lot of my pictures walking around since the early morning that day. If you are not in Guatemala it could be hard for you to understand but I walked nearly 4 km under the sun (non linear) working. Is not the same to just walk than walk and stop… work… walk and you know the rest.
Well, I spent like 8 hours walking and reached zone 4. After some rolls of 36 pictures I was trying to capture this bridge only to see I was at picture #38+…
Yes… I didn’t put the film right so there were 26 picture missing. I opened my camera and the strip was cutted and that’s why it didn’t work.
I had to go back and take several pictures again that day and come back the next day to finish the job. I must empathize: the sun was too mad at me. Lesson learned…
You can check more of my pictures at Fotos de Guatemala
