Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/06/12

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Subject: RE: [Leica] Leica bug
From: "B. D. Colen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net>
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 16:21:44 -0400

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.