Taking Pictures
I got my first camera in 1959 when I was ten, a plastic Kodak box camera. The shutter speed was fixed and there was no way to focus the camera or change the aperture. Pictures taken in low light did not come out. Pictures taken in bright light were burned out. Even so, every once in a while I managed to take a pretty good picture with the camera.
The big problem for me as a ten-year-old beginning photographer was the cost of film and the cost of developing the film. My parents gave me the camera, but after the first few rolls of film were shot and developed they would not pay for more film or film developing. I was neither surprised nor greatly disappointed. This was how my parents were about almost everything. They had plenty of money but as children during the Great Depression they had been poor so…
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When I went off to UC Santa Cruz in 1967 my father gave me his old fixed-lens Minolta. After settling into my dorm room, I went out into the world and shot two rolls of film, then went to the camera shop in Santa Cruz and got the film developed. Only a few of the pictures came out in focus and most were over or under-exposed. So I took my camera to the camera shop guy, he opened the camera up, looked at various things under a magnifying lens and said, “It’s shot. It would cost you more to fix this than to buy a new and much better camera.”
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I dropped out of college two years later and got a job as a translator for a marine biologist traveling with his family to Costa Rica in a converted milk-delivery truck exploring Pacific tide pools along the way. I bought a good camera to take with me and on that great adventure I shot twenty rolls of Agfachrome slide film. Agfachrome was a superb film made in Germany and every roll came with a sturdy little mailer you could mail from anywhere in the world and the film would go to a processing plant and the slides would be mailed to wherever you wanted them mailed. Thus twenty boxes of slides awaited me in California at the end of the six-month adventure. I got some fabulous photographs, none of which I still have.
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The camera I shot those Agfacolor pictures with was one I’d bought at the prompting of my father. A salesman at a camera store my father haunted in Menlo Park said if my father would buy two of the same discontinued Japanese cameras, he would give my father an incredible deal. As I recall, the camera body cost me seventy dollars, the standard lens was thirty, and the telephoto lens was fifty.
Home from Central America without a job or much money I embarked on the life of a vagabond for a couple years from 1970 to 1972, during which time I schlepped that camera and lenses all over America and Canada in my big old backpack but never had money for film or processing. When I eventually settled in Santa Cruz in 1972, I sold the camera and lenses for forty bucks and bought my first steel-string guitar.
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In 1978 my first novel was published and had a big paperback sale and a movie sale. With my newfound riches I immediately bought a good Canon and took lots of black and white pictures, mostly portraits of friends. I loved taking pictures and for the first time in my life had plenty of money for film and film processing.
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In 1979 I moved to Sacramento to start a little movie company with my college pal Robert Smith. Just a few weeks after moving to Sacramento, the house I was renting was robbed and my wonderful Canon was stolen. A few weeks after the robbery I purchased two little Minoltas for Robert and I to use on our first gig under the banner of Walsmith Productions.
That first gig was a slide show for the annual Camellia Festival in Sacramento. We shot thousands of pictures, got lots of good ones, and the slide show was a resounding success.
After a couple years Robert and I parted ways as business partners and have remained close friends ever since. When my little Minolta bit the dust I got a good pocket camera and continued taking black and white photos.
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In 1995, after ten years of scraping by with very little money, I made another Hollywood deal and sold a novel. Flush with cash I moved to Berkeley from Sacramento and bought a good Nikon camera and got back into shooting black and white photos. When the cash flow returned to a trickle a couple years later I couldn’t afford the film and processing costs and ceased taking pictures.
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In 2005 I moved to Mendocino. In 2006 I got together with Marcia. She had a little digital camera. I shot some pictures with her camera and moments later they manifested as photos on her computer. A miracle!
Not long after that life-changing moment I bought my first little point-and-shoot digital camera, a Nikon, and since then I’ve carried a pocket camera with me everywhere every day and, as you know, I illustrate my blog postings with photos I take along my way. I love taking pictures and sharing them with you.
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You Are the One from Todd’s album Lounge Act In Heaven