When I was seven years old my father gave me a Kodak Brownie camera. It used large (expensive) 220 film and had a waist level view finder.
I took horrible pictures with this camera. The horizon was always crooked and I always cut the tops of people's heads off! My father was not happy that I would waste his hard earned money this way. I stopped taking pictures and at seven my photography career was over.
For my eighth birthday my grandfather, an amateur photographer named John Goodman, gave me his old Voitlander Vito B camera. This was a 35mm rangefinder camera with an almost silent shutter. Suddenly I was taking great photos! Career on!
By age 13 I had a darkroom built in the basement. My folks actually gave up a downstairs bathroom so I could use it as a darkroom!
In 1969 Walter Cronkite did the news and Apollo 11 landing on the moon was big news! During his broadcast he gave specific instructions on how to photograph your TV screen. I convinced my parents I had to do this and I have wonderful images (in B/W) taken off my TV screen of the first steps on the moon. Little did I realize these photos would later convince my 11th grade Social Studies teacher to give me a passing grade because after all they were of American history and I already knew I was going to be a photographer!
At age 14 I did my first commercial job. My neighbor, a butcher by trade was getting into a new venture as a salesman for something called Cable TV. He paid me $10.00 to take a photo and make one 8x10 B/W print of the adapter used to connect your TV to a cable.
By the time I was in 10th grade I was hanging out at the camera store everyday after school. I worked there everyday but never was paid a dime. It was a labor of love. And then it happened, the owner came to me and said he would trade me a brand new, just released, Canon F-1 with a 50mm lens for my old Voitlander, even. I jumped at it and used that camera until I went digital in 1994!
In addition to letting me pass 11th grade Social Studies my teacher got me enrolled in BOCES. In New York the trade schools are administered by the Board Of Cooperative Education Services. They had a two year program in Professional Photography but my teacher got me enrolled in the second year of the program for my senior year of high school. I was really on my way.
I applied to only three colleges because there were only three schools with good photography programs. The Rochester Institute of Technology was the top school in the world for photography but I got wait listed so I went to the SUNY (State University of New York) Farmingdale for an A.A.S. in Photographic Science & Engineering. During orientation they told us to look at the person to our right, to our left, in front of us, and behind us. They said none of them would be there at graduation. 256 students started that two year program and only 17 graduated. I was one of them.
I was able to transfer to RIT and graduated with a B.B.S. in Commercial Photography in 1979.
I took horrible pictures with this camera. The horizon was always crooked and I always cut the tops of people's heads off! My father was not happy that I would waste his hard earned money this way. I stopped taking pictures and at seven my photography career was over.
For my eighth birthday my grandfather, an amateur photographer named John Goodman, gave me his old Voitlander Vito B camera. This was a 35mm rangefinder camera with an almost silent shutter. Suddenly I was taking great photos! Career on!
By age 13 I had a darkroom built in the basement. My folks actually gave up a downstairs bathroom so I could use it as a darkroom!
In 1969 Walter Cronkite did the news and Apollo 11 landing on the moon was big news! During his broadcast he gave specific instructions on how to photograph your TV screen. I convinced my parents I had to do this and I have wonderful images (in B/W) taken off my TV screen of the first steps on the moon. Little did I realize these photos would later convince my 11th grade Social Studies teacher to give me a passing grade because after all they were of American history and I already knew I was going to be a photographer!
At age 14 I did my first commercial job. My neighbor, a butcher by trade was getting into a new venture as a salesman for something called Cable TV. He paid me $10.00 to take a photo and make one 8x10 B/W print of the adapter used to connect your TV to a cable.
By the time I was in 10th grade I was hanging out at the camera store everyday after school. I worked there everyday but never was paid a dime. It was a labor of love. And then it happened, the owner came to me and said he would trade me a brand new, just released, Canon F-1 with a 50mm lens for my old Voitlander, even. I jumped at it and used that camera until I went digital in 1994!
In addition to letting me pass 11th grade Social Studies my teacher got me enrolled in BOCES. In New York the trade schools are administered by the Board Of Cooperative Education Services. They had a two year program in Professional Photography but my teacher got me enrolled in the second year of the program for my senior year of high school. I was really on my way.
I applied to only three colleges because there were only three schools with good photography programs. The Rochester Institute of Technology was the top school in the world for photography but I got wait listed so I went to the SUNY (State University of New York) Farmingdale for an A.A.S. in Photographic Science & Engineering. During orientation they told us to look at the person to our right, to our left, in front of us, and behind us. They said none of them would be there at graduation. 256 students started that two year program and only 17 graduated. I was one of them.
I was able to transfer to RIT and graduated with a B.B.S. in Commercial Photography in 1979.
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