Rory - Australian native bees are "mostly harmless"... and luckily I never found too much of a hive. Wasps were also in my sights I seem to remember, and yes I did get bitten, and they do hurt...
Rory - Australian native bees are "mostly harmless"... and luckily I never found too much of a hive. Wasps were also in my sights I seem to remember, and yes I did get bitten, and they do hurt...
Len Metcalf
Leonard Murray Metcalf BA Dip Ed MEd
Len's gallery lenmetcalf.com
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hi john
nice thread!
i was given a camera when i was 5 or 6 ( mickey mouse camera took 126 film ) and i started photographing the usual stuff - shrubs, the ground, brothers &C. i later got my mom's old kodak flashfun and used that for a while. i photographed my stay at summer camp, and made some portraits of grammar school friends. i was kind of an introvert, didn't really fit into the wasp-y town i grew up in, and when i was in high school i quickly took to photography classes (and the darkroom) to remove myself from the usual all-boys high school-stuff. i didn't really fit in there either since wasn't given a bmw, porsche or other expensive sports car when i turned 16 ....
i learned bookbinding when i was in boy scouts, around the same time i took a history class where i had to write an oral history paper ... so i guess i have been doing the same things - portriats, hand made books, photographing stuff no one cares about, and interviews since i was a kid ...
john
I have been making pictures since I was about 12 years old and have most all of the slides and negatives I ever made. The first camera was an Argus B1, which I still have, and mostly used Kodachrome 10 with it which was fortunate as they still retain all the color they ever had. My Dad taught me to develop 126 and 120 roll film with the red darkroom light for my Cub scout merit badge and I have been hooked on wet process B&W since then, some 60 years. My personal work is 4x5 landscape and portrait photography. But it all started long ago and hopefully will continue as long as I am around. Paul
I don't think childhood experiences impacted my choice of subject matter much, but they certainly affected my interest in photography.
My Dad always had a camera. First, it was a Nikon S that he picked up when in Japan on his way to (or from) Korea. What a great camera. He still has it. The Nikon was replaced as an everyday camera by a Spotmatic. During the Spotmatic's heyday, my uncle gave me a Konica Auto S2, a nice fixed lens rangefinder. I still have it. The Konica gave way to a Canon FTb, which I bought because my Dad purchased a Canon F-1. Both cameras are workhorses. We built a darkroom in our basement, and I spent many hours down there. By the way, I still have the Meopta enlarger we bought, and my current 35mm cameras are the FTb I bought in 1972 or so, and my Dad's old F-1. He has gone digital, but I have not.
Photography was always a part of our life growing up. It was natural to keep it up into adulthood (although an old job demanded so much of my time, there was a ten year interlude during which there was no time for photography). I think my Dad thinks I am nuts to carry a 4x5 around, although he does like the results!
I think I first decided to become a photographer in third or fourth grade, reading Spiderman comic books. Peter Parker/Spiderman would set up an automatic camera before pouncing on bad guys, and sell the pictures to the newspaper to put himself through college. It made a lot of sense, and I figured I could do the same when I got my super-powers...
Sadly, my only super-power turned out to be an uncanny ability to attract dust to my film, and I never developed a motor-drive/auto-sequence-timer for my 8x10...
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