Today, a humbling walk down memory lane to Christmas 1994, the day I received my dad’s old Canon FTb film camera and, after a quick lesson in loading the film, aperture, exposure, and focus, began to take pictures. These are the things I photographed on my first outing.
A cemetery
Get a camera, photograph a cemetery. It’s almost a cliché. This cemetery lay just up the street from our subdivision. There was no gate, no caretaker, just clusters of very old, worn graves on the corner. They terrified us.
Nature
Icicles and sunsets.
To my credit, those were splendid icicles hanging from my friend’s roof.
As for the sunset, while it’s an amateur photograph, it’s a picture of my parents’ back yard covered in snow. Beyond the barren, Midwestern winter trees is an unknown world. The future. Hope. Excitement.
That was then. Now that picture is the past. We don’t live there anymore. It’s a December sunset on a world that’s long gone.
Friends
I made the rounds that Christmas, visiting friends, trying in vain to capture images in dim rooms with a flash. I did get out to the pizza place in Enon, Ohio, where I worked as a driver that Christmas, as well as Young’s Jersey Dairy in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where I photographed my friend with an overpowered burst of flash.
Family
Max the dog chewing on a milk carton. Dad with the dog and a whole lot of shutter drag. And the one artistic expression: two of my sisters attacking with toys. They took direction well, but none of us knew what this was about then, or now.
Beloved Mediocrity
There they are—the surviving images from my first roll of film shot on an slr at Christmas 1994. They’re not good photos, but they are the only memories that remain of that time twenty-eight years ago. Sometimes that’s all that matters.
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