A life of taking photographs

I remember the first time a took a photograph. I was six or seven and on a school field trip to a dairy. My parents had sent me off with a Kodak Brownie camera and told me to point it at a cow and push the button. I found that photograph while I was cleaning out my mother’s house after her death in 1984. It was a horrible shot with half to the picture blocked by a fence railing. But there was a little bit of cow visible.

My father was an avid amateur photographer. A year or two after my uncertain start at the dairy, he gave me one of his old, basic cameras. I think it was a Graflex. It had a reflex mirror that made a clump, and you had to set the shutter speed and aperture based on a hand held light meter. I really took to this. I remember setting up battle scenes with my miniature toy soldiers and taking up-close pictures. I even tried to add smoke effects by putting something flammable in a small plastic cannon, but as I recall the cannon melted.

By the time I was in middle school, my father had showed me how to develop and print my own black and white photos, and we set up a darkroom in the attic of the garage. As I recall, water was supplied by a hose from the garden. In high school I took photos for the yearbook.

While I was in medical school, I got interested in the early masters of photography like P.H. Emerson, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams. I took a few photography courses at a local Atlanta community arts center including an advanced course on the Zone System, a method for balancing light tones developed by Ansel Adams and others in the 1940s.

I took this photo on an icy Christmas morning in 1978 in Hyde Park, London. For our Christmas break during my penultimate year of medical school, Lois and I decided to go to London instead of the usual visit to our families in California.

As life got much busier with work and family, my photography switched to record shots and mostly color prints. No more dark room work. Then about 2000 came the switch to digital.

After retirement in 2013, I got back to taking photographs for the artistic satisfaction rather than just recording life. I like to focus on wildlife and landscapes now. These may be birds as common as a robin,

or as exotic as a puffin.

In my many trips to Tanzania teaching neurology, I have had the chance to photograph many beautiful birds and animals including this giraffe at sunrise,

and this black-backed jackal.

Of course there is also that sometimes wild dog, our Jack, who livens and enriches our lives.

In a very literal sense, photography is saving memories for me, memories that are more and more easily getting lost. Looking at old and even recent photos takes me back to those times in the past, if only for just a moment.