officially, a lesson in history, part two

Ok.  So, all that stuff I talked about before happened.  Which brings us to ~mid-summer 1997.  I got home from family vacation, bought a couple Popular Photography magazines, and started learning some basics.  I think I also bought or was given one of those all-encompassing how-to-be-a-photographer books, with lots of poorly printed black and white images from the 70’s as illustrations. I learned about some things like frame composition, the rule of thirds, what an f-stop is, the difference between slide and print films and their respective speeds and grains, etc.  I suddenly had big dreams….

I knew that my dad had a bag full of camera gear, and that only about half of it was ever used.  So, I thought, why not try and learn to use the other half?  The other half was an Olympus OM-1 SLR and a handful of Zuiko lenses, most notably the 24mm (wide-angle), the 35 (kind of wide angle), and 85mm (kind of telephoto, for portraits).  All had a maximum aperture of f/2, so they were fast lenses that could be used in low light, or to create a shallow depth of field, perfect!  Read on!

The thing about the OM-1 is that it is a full manual camera, which is the right thing to have to learn how everything with shutter speeds and f-stops and focusing and metering works and interrelates.  The other thing about it is that it takes a little battery to operate the exposure meter, but sometimes (at least with my dad’s) the battery didn’t last too long.  Or the meter needle would stick and you kind of had to “bump” the viewfinder to get it to operate.  Or it just wouldn’t work at all.  These are the reasons why he had left it to collect dust in favor of his OM-2S, a generally more reliable model as far as I can tell.

So, I went about learning.  I cranked out some rolls of pretty mediocre stuff, including a pretty crappy science project about “the camera shutter speed required to stop the motion of a moving fan blade”, aka, the easiest project ever.  Still though, I had this problem of money.  It ain’t cheap to bang out a “learning” roll of film as a teenager and have to pay to have it processed and printed.  Plus you had to get a ride to and from the photo store. It seemed to really limit my output, which was a shame.  Once again, teenagers these days are so lucky to have the opportunity to learn these things basically for free.

I got basic shot composition down alright, at least in terms of the classic, “this might not be too creative but it won’t look screwed up” kind of ways.  I’ve always had an eye, an ear, and a memory for the technical, so a lot of the letters and numbers and maths of photography came quite naturally to me.  Now, let me back up and say, I continuously feel like I’m learning new stuff with this, and maybe re-learning it in different ways, especially since the onslaught of digital, and I feel in no way that I have fully grasped everything yet.  I just mean that at the time I probably knew a little more than the average bear about how to make pictures that didn’t look bad.  Not that they looked too good though…

Well, they could look good, if I was patient and really tried.  See below.  I feel like my attention span was relatively short at the time.  Or I always wanted some other piece of gear, some other tool, to make my photos better.  I’m still kind of like that, but I’m trying more and more not to be.  It’s not always about the gear.  In fact, it probably isn’t at all, most of the time.  I’ve gotten some really cool photos from my iPhone with a little thought and planning.  It has a lot to more to do with practice…with banging out those learning rolls…with getting one good shot in a roll of 24 and knowing that that’s a pretty good ratio, but trying to make it two or three.  Or, nowadays, filling up that 8-gig memory card, and only “starring” 1 in 20 files in Aperture.  Alright, back on track:

In all this learning, I learned a couple of other things.  First, I learned about this place called B&H.  This was back when they took out 10-page ads in the back of photo magazines; I dunno, maybe they still do, but I don’t read Pop Photo anymore.  Not that I’m too good for it….it just seems like the whole mag is one big advertisement.  They like EVERYTHING too much.

So yeah, B&H.  I started poring over those ads, thinking that I needed something a little bit more reliable and expandable, and maybe more future-proof (though that’s a whole other discussion considering the past ten years) than the old OM.  I told myself that by the end of the summer I’d buy a camera for myself.  Before high school started.  I did lots of chores and cut my parents’ grass about twice as often as it needed in order to boost the allowance a bit, along with other odd summer kid jobs.  I started saving.  Saving. Like I’d never saved before!  Because, I had fallen in love…with the Canon EOS Elan-II.

Ain’t she a beaut?  So well laid out!  Built-in flash!  A million different auto-focus lenses available, for all the action and sports photography I was sure to do as soon as it was in my hands!  Honestly I think that I chose it because I liked the way it looked.  It’s still a darn good-looking camera.  But I also chose it because it was a step up from the plasticky Rebel line of cameras, and still (although this seemed unreal at the time) pretty affordable at $550, as long as I didn’t buy the one with eye-controlled focus (good choice, Chris).  That $550 would include a kit lens, a Sigma 28-80 f/3.5-5.6, a pretty OK kind-of-wide to kind-of-tele starter lens. I had gotten used to the quickness of the f/2’s that my dad owned, so the slower speed of this lens seemed like the only true stumbling block.  It wasn’t a stumbling block for very long though, because it broke about two years after I bought it…the AF drive was very plasticky and gave out.  Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself, I just gave something away in this RIVETING story, out of order…yes, I saved up and I bought it.  And I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

And I still have it, and it’s still going strong.  The camera, that is.  Sorry to possibly confuse.

Now that I’ve got it though, where do we go from there??  We go into high school.  Then, we go back out west for another family vacation on spring break.  This time I was armed with something more substantial than the Olympus AF-1 point ‘n shoot though; oh, and also, the other thing I’d learned about….well, I’d heard about this guy named Ansel Adams:

Aren’t you glad you read all the way to the bottom to see that picture?!  I was so proud of it.  It’s the only one from that time that I had enlarged…and gave it as a gift!  I felt so accomplished!  I still am proud of it, especially considering just how early on this all was for me.

Right, I should probably say that the photo is from Zion National Park, which, coincidentally, I’m about to have a eleven-year reunion with next week.  We’ll see if much has changed.  I doubt that it has in terms of the park.  Maybe, just a little, with me though….

More to come!

Zion photo notes: April 1998, Agfapan 25, f/16, shutter speed ??…slow and on my original Slik 444 sport traveler tripod, I’m sure.  Scanned with a Canon 9900F about a year ago.