Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/06/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Ah, the bug. My father had always had a camera, a Contaflex at one point, then a Rollie. My first camera was a Kodax Brownie, followed by something I remember as a Pony, a little 127 Kodak. My first serious camera was an old Leica IIIc with a Canon 50 f1.8. I bought the IIIc, along with a Weston Master V meter because a camp counselor whom I looked up to had one. His father owned the camp so this counselor also had a darkroom in his parents house and I was introduced to B&W developing and printing, particularly the joys of pushing Tri-X with Acufine and Diafine. Anyway, the summer I was 16 going on 17 I applied for a job as a photographer at a local paper, The Westport (Conn.) Town Crier. They obviously weren't about to hire a kid whose claim to fame was doing some shooting for the school yearbook and paper. But I hung around and made enough of a pain of myself so that they started to give me odd assignments, which they said they'd pay me for at $10 bucks per shot used. After two weeks they were paying me $90 per, so they took me on for the summer. The high point of that season - besides using my Dad's Rollie with reflex hood and pistol grip - was being sent by the paper to cover the March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom - yup - MLK's I Have A Dream speech. I left home at 2:30 a.m. by train with the local group going to D.C. for the March and the following week the paper published a couple pages of my photos and what I thought was a wonderfully insightful essay which I later realized was wonderfully insightful only to a 17-year-old liberal white boy from the burbs ( I shot the March with a Honeywell Pentax with 50 1.8 and Schneider 135 f 3.5 tele I'd gotten for my birthday). The following summer found me in summer school in Newport, RI, with a girlfriend who happened to be the daughter of a photo editor at Life. That got parlayed into a brick of Tri-X from Life to shoot at the Newport Folk Festival, and processing by Life. No, they didn't use the photos, but I did get some great shots of all the folkies. The following summer found me in Blue Hill, Me., working as the only photographer/reporter for The Weekly Packet. I shot all kinds of features, and got sent way Down East to shoot an incredible forest fire that was raging for weeks and drawing volunteer fire fighters from all over the Northeast. Got back to my paper in the early evening, exhausted, stinking of smoke, with great stuff, and my editor told me that the Boston Globe wanted what ever I had. Ah, my chance at the big time. So I went into the darkroom, misloaded a bunch of Nikkor (sp?) reels, and screwed up just about all my negs! In a way my photo career was down hill from there and my writing career started to build. I kept shooting for school and college papers, but I also started writing seriously and by the end of my senior year at George Washington U. I was a staff writer for the Washington Post, and my then Nikon F was something I used to amuse myself. Over the years I went from the Nikon to Cannon - F1 and A1 - back to Leica with an M3 and an M2 and then a pair of CLs, on to Olympus - OM4 - and finally back to Leica - an M6, 34 Asph Summilux, 50 chron, and 90 chron. During my 23 years in daily journalism (at the Washington Post and Newsday) I specialized in medical writing, shared a Pulitzer in '84 and wrote 10 books. But the only shooting I did was on one of my last assignments at Newsday, when I went to East Africa and Somalia for a month in Jan. 93. There I was shooting as well as writing - Extapress, the OM4 and an IS-3 - and remembered how much fun that could be. For the last five years I've been doing PR (mostly writing) and shooting on the side - family, friends, pets, street stuff. The PR life did give me the excuse to hire Gene Richards for a job, which was a real kick. But...Anyway, that's it. Except for the fact that my oldest son just graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he was a TA for Bill Burke, and is attempting a career in photography (his specialty at the moment is skateboard photography and he's damn good at it). And my daughter is a photo major at the Art Institute of Boston - using my Olympus equipment. So the beat goes on.