1970s: Early Photography Beginnings

The journey begins in about 1974, when I was about 11 or 12. Our elementary school class went on a field trip to the Fernbank Planetarium in Atlanta, Georgia. While we were there we had an opportunity to see all the exhibits including an Apollo capsule, which was very thrilling for me because I was a big fan of the space program (and still am). But it was when I visited the gift shop that everything changed. There I saw a camera for sale – a Diana F—what most people would dismiss as a cheap plastic toy, both then and now. But remembering how much my mother had taken family photos with her camera but never let anyone else touch it, I looked at it as a chance to be independent and take photos of my own. I had some spending money for the trip, so I bought it. It came with a roll of black and white film (in a size I later learned was called 120, the same as medium format cameras), and it had rudimentary instructions on how to use it. I loaded the film on the bus during the ride back to school, and tried taking some photos along the way and later after I got home. My mom seemed a little annoyed that I had seemingly wasted my money, and expected I wouldn’t use it for long because of the cost of film and processing. But my dad thought differently. He not only had my first roll processed, but he also bought more film for me to use. He was interested in photography like I was, and this was his way I think of encouraging me to “do something other than stick your nose in a book.” His interest was in shooting home movies of the family with his Keystone Super 8 movie camera.

I did keep using that camera for about a year, until the lens eventually fell off (the Diana was made of mostly plastic parts glued together), and it went into the scrap heap. But by then my interest in photography had taken solid hold and has been with me ever since.

Within a year or so, I acquired the first of what became several 110 cameras, many of them made by Vivitar. 110 was a very dramatic change from the Diana – the film was only a fraction of the size of the 120 rolls, and it was packaged in plastic cartridges that made loading and unloading super simple – just open the back cover and drop it in. I also first experienced using color film with the 110, where all my 120 rolls had been black and white. The Vivitar and other makes of 110 cameras were more durable than the Diana, but still prone to malfunctions from time to time causing me to replace them every few months. I continued to use these through the end of the decade and into my first year or so in college in 1980-81.

Around 1978, my father began letting me use his Keystone Super 8 movie camera regularly. This was the camera he’d used to document our family life on film, and now it became another tool for me to explore visual storytelling. I remember using it at a family gathering that year, capturing my uncles gathered together in conversation—a moment that became unexpectedly precious when one of them passed away shortly before I attended GHP the following summer. The Super 8 camera taught me that photography and film weren’t just about capturing images; they were about preserving memories of people and moments that wouldn’t last forever.

In the summer of 1979 between my junior and senior years in high school, I attended the Governor’s Honors Program (GHP) sponsored by the State of Georgia. Only about 600 high school students per year were selected from across the state to spend six weeks on a college campus participating in focused “enrichment” courses in subject areas they were nominated in by their teachers (in my case, I was nominated in Social Studies as I had a keen interest in history). When I saw Photography listed among the two-week electives, I signed up immediately. On the first day, the instructor introduced us to the tools we would be using, central of which was 35mm single lens reflex (SLR) cameras. On top of that, we would be shooting with color slide film, and there was no limit to how many rolls of film we could shoot. The camera assigned to me was his personal Olympus OM-2, and he took great care in showing me how to operate it and get the most out of it.

I was over the moon with this opportunity! I took the camera everywhere with me – to class, meals in the cafeteria, concerts, recreational time, and just wandering around the campus. As the boxes of mounted slides started coming back, he would evaluate them and give me pointers on how I could improve my shots… and off I’d go again. I came up with a plan for the slides… We each had to present a final project in my Social Studies group at the end of the program, and I chose to use the slides to tell the “story of GHP”. I selected slides, wrote the script, and then presented it to the class. It was a huge success, with my instructors remarking that no one had ever attempted such a presentation that looked at the program itself before. I took the slides home with me at the end of the program and later made a presentation at my school to prospective GHP candidates.

But even more importantly than that, I knew what direction I wanted my hobby to go.

1980s – First SLR and System Building

I graduated from high school in 1980 and started in college that fall. As a freshman from a working-class family (made even more “working” from my parents divorcing just before my graduation), extra money over and above the grants and loans I had for school was hard to come by. I worked part time on the weekends to cover my expenses, which left little for luxuries like hobbies… but I managed to squeeze in shooting a 110 cartridge every now and then.

As I was looking forward to my sophomore year in the fall of 1981, the rules for financial aid were changing and I was unable to obtain enough funding to pay for tuition. In talking with one of the school counselors, I learned about their Cooperative Education (co-op) program, which paired students up with companies who would hire them to work full-time in their field of study. The pay would cover my school expenses, but it came at the cost of taking longer to finish the degree (work and school would be during alternating quarters, reducing classes to two quarters each year instead of three). It was better than the alternative of dropping out, so I signed up. The first assignment was very generous in pay, and with having weekends off with no school assignments it gave me the incentive to jump back into my photography.

I had been out shopping one evening after work that fall, and came across a display of 35mm SLR cameras for sale. The salesman was another college student who was studying art and photography, and we struck up a conversation about his studies and the equipment he used. I mentioned how much I enjoyed using the OM-2 a couple of years earlier, and he suggested that I continue to pursue working in 35mm. Among the various camera models on display were several Minoltas, and he pointed out one he thought would be a good camera for learning. It was a relatively new model called the XG-A. I looked it over as he demonstrated its features, and I went home with some literature to think about it. A few days later I returned and placed an order for one. Then as now, cameras were sold in kits that included a basic lens in a fixed focal length, as zoom lenses were much more expensive and out of reach for most consumers. The XG-A was paired with a 50mm lens, which was often called a “normal” lens back then (“normal” meaning the field of view was similar to what a person normally sees).

The XG-A represented several firsts for me: first owned 35mm camera, first interchangeable lens camera, first “serious” camera for taking more than snapshots, and first major expense in camera gear. And initially I was scared to death that I might do something wrong and either damage or destroy it.

But I need not have feared at all. I took it everywhere, looking for opportunities to take photos any place that seemed worthy of recording on film. The XG-A was tougher than it looked and got bounced around frequently (before I learned about padded gadget bags, which was later), but it never failed to work when I pressed the shutter button. It was primarily an aperture-priority camera, which I found was an ideal format to learn with as it allowed me to understand the relationship between aperture and shutter speed and how they combined with the film speed to affect the outcome in my photos.

As I built up my experience using the XG-A, I was finding how much having only a single 50mm lens was limiting my photos to the same basic views all the time. I started looking into what I could do to add more variety, and found I would need to increase my investment by adding more lenses. The conventional wisdom was to obtain separate lenses for differing needs, such as a wide angle lens, a telephoto lens, and so on. Zoom lenses were starting to come down in price, making them more within reach (remember I was still in college at the time), but major brand lenses (like Minolta) were extremely expensive. Third party lenses were much less costly, and one brand that consistently stood out was Vivitar. I had determined I wanted a longer telephoto lens, and found Vivitar made an 80-200mm that would fit my budget. I purchased it, and suddenly I could pull distant subjects into far more pleasing compositions than the 50mm could manage. Later I began looking at the other end of the focus range, toward wider angles for landscapes and group photos, and that led me to my second zoom lens purchase, an Osawa 35-70mm. At this point I retired the 50mm lens, as the two zooms allowed me to do more than ever before. I suppose at this stage I could say I had built my first camera “system” but I never really thought about it that way… it was just me and my camera.

I found a very worthy testing ground in Stone Mountain Park, a large state park east of Atlanta. Whenever I acquired a new piece of equipment or wanted to try a different film stock, I’d make a day of driving out and spending time wandering through the park. I became familiar with the granite dome, the surrounding trails, and the variety of subjects from landscapes to architectural details, which gave me a way to benchmark and compare how each new piece of equipment worked and what each new film stock could do. I especially enjoyed trying out new film types, developing a fondness for Fujifilm’s G series and the unique ECN-2 process films from Seattle Film Works, comparing how each rendered color, grain, and contrast. These Stone Mountain visits taught me as much about photography as any book or class could have; it was my personal laboratory where theory met practice, roll after roll.

My interest in cameras didn’t just stop with 35mm. There were other technologies coming out in the 1980s, and I was keen to give them a try when the opportunity came up.

One of these was a new film format called the Disc. 110 cameras were smaller than most film formats, but interest in them was fading. Kodak figured creating an even smaller camera would be very appealing, and so the disc camera was born. I purchased one of their less expensive models called the “Disc 3000” and used it several times. In practice it was handy for situations where carrying my XG-A wasn’t practical, but the images were not much better than the 110 snapshots I had taken years before. It never really caught on with me, and my interest in it faded about the same time as it did for the general public.

Another interest was instant photography. Polaroid had of course been the only company offering instant photography for decades, and when they introduced their SX-70 in the late 1970s with self-contained film to rave reviews Kodak looked at it as an opportunity to jump on the bandwagon. They introduced their own form of instant film and cameras called Colorburst, which developed a popular following but not quite as large as Polaroid. Around 1984, while visiting my college roommate’s home, his family took me to a flea market where I found a Kodak instant camera for sale; it was a model called “The Handle” because its shape incorporated a large handle on one side. I bought it and used it regularly, finding the images were mostly on par with Polaroid’s quality. A few years later, Kodak was forced to stop making the film due to being sued for patent infringement, making the camera no longer usable.

After about four years of using the XG-A, I felt I was reaching the creative limits of the camera and began looking for an upgrade. Given I now had an investment in lenses, I looked very carefully at Minolta’s other offerings. Their flagship camera was the X-700, which offered a Programmed Exposure mode; this was in direct competition with Canon, which had introduced their version called the AE-1 Program. Program mode seemed too good to be true to me, where nothing needed to be done other than pointing and focusing, so I wasn’t very interested in it. Minolta then introduced another model called the X-570, which had all the features of the X-700 except Program mode and at a more attractive price. While I hated to part with the XG-A, I decided to sell it and put the funds toward a new X-570 body, which I bought and immediately put to work.

The X-570 gave me a more robust camera with better features and controls, allowing me to explore more creative work. I shot events for family and friends, including weddings, and more extensive travel photos; at one point it had given me the thought of going into professional photography work, but I decided to stick with just being a by now very advanced amateur. This is the camera that carried me through the remainder of the decade and into the early 90s, when the next evolution in my photographic journey would take place.