I started taking pictures in grade school--snap shots with an old Brownie, then pretty quickly moving on to using 126 film in an old Instamatic. In Middle School, about 1974, they built a brand new darkroom at our school and started photography classes. I took the first offering, and when the semester was over, was the first on campus to sign up for "Photography 2." Somewhere around that period, my parents bought me an old Yashica rangefinder (what a great camera) and I started shooting 35 mm. Most of my photography then had to do with school assignments ("take a photograph that makes you laugh," etc.). Outside of school, I loved the work of Ansel Adams, and aspired to take breathtaking landscapes some day using a large format camera.
Towards the end of Middle School (in 1976), my dad's job took us to Johannesburg, South Africa. I got an old Soviet "Cosmorex" SLR and a cheap 400 mm lens, and became a nature photographer--which seemed like the logical thing to do, given the opportunity to live in Africa! When not touring game parks on weekends and vacations, I was tromping through the veldt around the house, taking photographs of all kinds of strange looking African birds. My original dream of being Ansel Jr. was replaced by my new dream of being a National Geographic photographer.
[ photograph above: Fallen Tree, Eastern Sierra, 1975 ]
