Photo History
My interest in photography dates back to a trip to Mount Rushmore when I was five years old. My mom bought a broken manual 35mm SLR from a garage sale just before
the trip. I was playing with the camera during the nighttime light show and somehow forgot it under the seat. (I was only a kid!) I was devastated. I made her go back to look for it in the dark but it wasn't there.
After that my interest in photography waned until high school when my dad taught me how to do basic black and white film processing and enlargement in an improvised bathroom darkroom with the equipment he had since his youth. He gave me his Minolta and I started experimenting with a working version of my childhood toy.
I enrolled in newspaper (truth be told, because it counted as an English credit and sounded like less work than a traditional literature or composition class), applied for a photography staff position, and got it. The Hazelwood Central Hawk Talk wasn't a great paper and the photographers weren't expected to
do much except taking and developing photos. We didn't crop or write cutlines. Just photos. Unfortunately I had the most darkroom experience so what I learned was mostly more practice of things my dad showed me several years earlier. I can make a straight print and can only do the most rudimentary burning and dodging.
Still, it was better than another English class.
I retired from journalism and, for the most part, photography until my third year at Truman. I joined as a freelance photographer. We were given film and five dollars for each published photo. After a few weeks I was covering four or five stories a week. Granted, we didn't usually
have exciting news, mostly speakers and scheduled student events, but I certainly burned a lot of film. I took the photo editor job my senior year and really started going crazy. I shot over 200 frames per issue (the Index is a weekly publication).
The problem with shooting so much is it becomes difficult to think of new angles, ideas, and perspectives.
Also, working with slow lenses in dark buildings during winter with very little natural light and in situations where strobe flash would be inappropriate makes it nearly impossible to
think about anything other than avoiding motion blur.
While at Truman some of my photos, mostly those shot for the Index, were printed in the alumni magazine; Detours, a student produced--then quarterly--travel magazine; and Echo, the yearbook.
I won some sort of award for the best yearbook sports photo (Mid-West Region) but I'm not sure which photo it was.
The Index also won the Pacemaker that year.