David asks: "What were you doing 35 years ago?" Well, 35 years ago, I was really discovering photography for the first time. Not with a camera, but by being invited to help out in the B&W darkroom of my High School's yearbook (annual) staff, which was all-students - led by a faculty "advisor". They had a Spotmatic and it was my first experience with an SLR. I remember taking some really disappointing stuff at some volleyball games. Honestly, I don't remember much of anything decent that I produced with the camera, but I was bitten by the darkroom bug and set up my own at home in a closet under our basement stairs.
I also naturally fell in with the photography nerds at school. One kid was determined to get an Olympus OM-1 system and eventually did. I remember helping him do his first Cibachromes in his home darkroom, which was my first exposure to color darkroom. I was subscribed to Popular Photography and Peterson's Photographic and even Camera 35 for a year or so. The nearest "real" photo store was "Snow's Camera" in Fremont, NE, about 35 miles away and every time I went there I had to wander around and drool, though mostly I left only with darkroom chemistry or a Peterson's compilation book. When I graduated High School, I took my gift money and purchased a Canon AE-1, which was a decent camera in 1977. It wasn't long after that, that the father-in-law of a cousin had a fatal heart attack and I inherited his wedding cameras, a pair of Mamiya C33s. That led to working for the local portrait studio, starting with negative retouching (now there's something nobody misses) and eventually all of his darkroom work (B&W and color) doing prints in a basket processor. Ah heck... I'll stop now. Thanks for indulging the little trip down memory lane. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
