Here I am, a month away from turning 15, leaning on Dads’s big old Chevy van (read its story here) which is parked in my parents’ driveway. Oh man, does this photo stir up a lot inside me. First, I’m about the same age here as my youngest son, about whom I wrote on Wednesday. Second, it was at about this age that I was learning to write code and found out that you could do that for a living, which set the path that I’m still on. Third, I had my first driving lessons in this van with its unpleasant, super-stiff manual steering. Fourth, my parents are about to leave this house after having lived in it for 38 years. They’re moving to Indianapolis to be near their children and grandchildren, and to be near Dad’s oncologist at the VA hospital here.
And fifth, this was taken with one of my vintage cameras. I’d been collecting since I was nine, but only started using my old cameras at about this age. This was taken with an Argus A-Four, a manual-everything 35mm camera from the mid-1950s. I was shooting Kodacolor II. I had little idea what I was doing with f stops and shutter speeds, and only about half the shots on the roll turned out. For this shot, I set exposure and focus and handed the camera to my brother to take the photo. I don’t have a print of this image anymore, so it was great to see it come back to life via my scanner. And it brings me joy to see that even 32 years ago, I was motivated to find out how well an old camera worked, and to learn something about photography.
See some black-and-white photos I took with this camera here.
