My first camera was a Pentax SLR K1000 I received for my 12th birthday. I had rode my bicycle down to Service Merchandise each weekend for months prior, to look at their selection of cameras, try the different cameras and ask the salesmen questions. I picked the Pentax because it was among the least expensive, looked well-built, and my favorite salesman really liked it.
Just because I had picked it did not mean I would get it, but I had asked my Dad if I could buy one with the money I had saved from mowing yards and he mentioned that perhaps I should wait til Christmas, if not til my birthday that came less than two months later.
Christmas came and went without a camera, so when my birthday finally arrived I was incredibly excited with each gift I opened. My last gift was a heavy, yet odd-shaped package. Unwrapping it I found a bulky black purse-like bag - just the thing a pre-teen guy wanted. My little sister quickly told me the bag was from her, and to look inside. Feeling awkward about looking in to a purse given to a boy, I found what the bag really was - a camera bag for the new Pentax K1000 my Dad and Stepmom put inside the bag.
Everyone that knew me knew I was creative by nature, as I drew pictures and wrote stories constantly, but my new camera opened up a whole new world to me. I was just a typical 12 year old - the kid with chocolate brown hair and gold streaks, riding on his mustard yellow dirt bike with a black bulky camera bag.
And no, I told all my friends, it was not a purse - it was a bad-ass black leather camera bag that just happened to look like a purse.
I took pictures constantly, and by the time I started high school I was excited for the opportunity to take photography courses. I chose black and white photography, as color photography seemed so cumbersome and time consuming. Lots of steps of mixing separate colors, monitoring the time, chemicals - gee, I just wanted to take pictures. Black and white photography, however, seemed a bit easier to understand - composing a picture with the different color gradients, and then standing in a room lit with a red light to wind film on a spool and submerse in chemicals. I grew confident in my abilities to develop film and make prints - around the school campus everyone would see me with my Pentax, my bad-ass black camera bag that looked like a purse, and a big black arm strap with PENTAX written in red letters.
My first taste of success came when I created what became known as the “Plane flying in to a house” picture. Shortly after I received my driver’s license at the age of 16, I was soon off to travel around town to take pictures. One day I found myself across the street from an old WWII landing strip that the Navy was currently using for touch-and-go landings for practice by their new Navy pilots. I had a couple rolls of 36 exposure film, so I tried to make each shot count. One roll I devoted to shooting the planes coming in for a landing. Directly across the street was a large plot of farm land, rows of grain about two feet tall, and an old dilapidated farmhouse with a palm tree out front. The farmhouse had no paint on it, some windows were broken or the screens were coming off, and the house appeared to be condemned. I stood directly in front of the house and took a dozen or so pictures with the farmhouse to left side of the frame, leaving an open area of nothing but rows of grain, to the right side of the frame. By itself the picture looked off kilter, as it was not centered on the subject - the house - like I had been taught to do in my photography courses.
Back in the lab at school, I developed my film and had a perfect negative of a plane coming in for a landing with nothing but pale blue skies surrounding it, along with a nice crisp shot of an old weathered wood house. I sandwiched the two negatives together precisely so as to create a final print - one which looked like I just happened to be in the right place at the right time - moments from impact. How could I have possibly been in the right place at the right time to take such a miraculous shot?
I made a large 11x 14 black and white print, hand-cut a mat for it, and turned it in to my teacher for an assignment. Within a few days she came up to me to ask me about the print. She was curious to find out what happened to the house, was anyone hurt, how I happened to be there, and why she had not heard anything about the accident in the news. I sheepishly explained to her that I had created the picture in the darkroom, and that both the plane and the house were doing just fine.
To my surprise, my teacher loved the picture and encouraged me to enter it in to the upcoming local art exhibition at the local coliseum. I entered the picture, and once the exhibition opened I went to see how my work was perceived. Row after row I walked, looking at all the nicely mounted photographs of fellow students. Each had a title, a photographer name, their grade and their school. Pictures were given titles like, “Sunrise”, “Sunset”, “Butterflies”, or “Ducks”. And there was my picture, self-explanatory - “Plane flying in to a house”.
I won 3rd place. It was the first photography contest I ever entered, and it gave me enough confidence to last 30 years.
And it is the reason I am writing this blog today - what positive thing will you do today that will impact your life for the next 30 years?
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