One picture from Dennis's gallery. Look ahead for this one and more.

So what does it take to change the quality of one person's snaps into photographs? Well, many pros would argue first and foremost that it's innate talent backed up by years of study and hard work. Okay, maybe so, but I'm not going to get into it; it's an argument that's perilously close to that wonderful time-waster,"What is Art?" Instead, I'll sidestep the issue by saying simply that with today's improved cameras and lenses and richly colored films (all of them amazingly improved since I began shooting "seriously" a quarter century ago), a real willingness to study your successes and your mistakes, and the time and dough to burn a bunch of film, you can produce — consistently — photographs worthy of the name. Photographs that, I contend, will rival what you see on magazine covers and calendars. Honest.

Look, I wouldn't be saying this about any of the arts in which talent is obviously the first requisite ingredient. Let's take painting, for instance. Most of us could paint ten hours a day for the rest of our lives and never come up with a canvas worth hanging anywhere but in front of a dartboard. Good painting is . . . magical. Good photography, in contrast, is a light-years-distant second. There's scarcely anything magical about the results most of us can get with the assistance of twenty-first-century technology, some time-honed skill, and the kind of eye that most of us have but that requires time and practice and commitment to develop.

Dennis Coello

But don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing that photography, because it is in the realm of the possible for most of us, isn't one of the"arts" (however one defines that). Nor am I attempting to diminish the loveliness of some photographs or the power of others. Don't you think most of us share a sense of good composition, and an ability to recognize beautiful scenes or great lighting? Of course we do. It's the reason why we ooh and ahh in art museums, why we pull over at the same places to view landscapes, why when we walk into one another's houses we admire the way things look. We see these "artful" scenes and we recognize and appreciate them. The problem is that almost all of us stopped trying to draw or sculpt or carve or write anything beautiful when we got out of school. Photography is a way — a relatively easy way, I tell people constantly — to make adults as proud of what they "paint" on film as they were of the pictures they drew in second grade.

Still, it isn't easy. I make a living with a camera, and I know what goes into pulling off the kinds of shots that clients demand. It demands effort. Effort expended to learn basic photographic technique, effort to put yourself in place to get the shots, effort to try again and again when you don't get it right. But my point once more is that with this effort, and with the unbelievable technology of today's equipment, almost all of us can do it. Compare that to what Rembrandt and Van Gogh did with a brush. Or Melville, for that matter, with a quill.

The gallery that follows is meant both to entertain your eye and, with the help of a few photographic principles I'll point out, to invite you to follow in the footsteps of thousands of snappers who have gone before. Enjoy the show.