Dad's influence, part 1

For the past couple of weeks, I've been thinking about how my Dad influenced my life. I think the most obvious thing might be my hobby, photography. When I was about 10, we moved to England and he bought a camera, a Zeiss Icon. He also subscribed to photography magazines. I was always looking for something to read, so I read those magazines. OK, I also looked at the pictures of scantily clad women, but I read about photography techniques and f-stops and shutter speeds and composition and all that stuff. Maybe that's why so few of my pictures consist of a group of people standing together smiling at a camera.

When I was 15, I had one of those cameras that you load a cassette of film into and take a picture and pull the film out and it develops in 60 seconds. One day I put one of my model cars (that had lots of "chrome") on top of a toaster oven and used up an entire package of film (probably $12 worth) trying to get a picture that looked decent. By having the camera close to the subject, the picture was guaranteed to be blurry. I was counting on that to hide the fact that it was just a model car. Unfortunately, I used up almost all of the film before I realized that the view finder didn't have the same view as the lens (unlike Dad's SLR) and so that's why all my pictures were offset. The last one was a lot better than the first, but none were very good. Anyway, Dad walked in to see what I was up to. I knew I was going to get yelled at for wasting all that film. Instead, he looked at the pictures for a few seconds, listened to my explanation of why most of them weren't centered, and walked out my room as if he were on his way to the next exhibit in a museum. Thinking back on it now, I bet that he was on his way to my sister's room and he was probably thinking that he was on his way to the next patient in a nut house.

When I was almost 30, Dad bought another camera (Pentax, I think) and gave me his Zeiss. I was thrilled. A real camera! The built in light meter was broken so I had to use an external, hand held meter. At first I was embarrassed to be using a hand held light meter, but I quickly learned that people thought I was some sort of pro because of that. I used black and white film for a long time and experimented with f-stops and shutter speeds and composition and all that stuff. I had a lot of fun and I still enjoy looking through that first album. I used that camera until we moved to Arizona (about 20 years).

There is so much to take pictures of in Arizona, at least in my opinion. I'm on my second digital camera now and at last count had over 16,000 pictures on my computer. I use the slide show screen saver and sometimes I sit in front of the computer for several minutes watching the pictures before I use the computer. I really enjoy this hobby, and I hope a few other people enjoy my pictures, too. Thank you, Dad.