A quote: “There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.” ~~ Napoleon Bonaparte
I’ll start with a story …
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I can’t resist an antique store. It’s all old stuff, odd stuff, what-is-this-thing stuff years old. I fell in love with haunting the aisles as a kid with mom.
Now I take my own daughter with me and I’m happy to see a little glee in her eyes when she finds a treasure she wants. I also insist ,if she runs short of space, she must give away something else for the new thing.
Our home is not a school for hoarders.
Weeks ago she spotted a camera. Intact SLR with a flawless lens. No film but she loves looking through it and hearing the shish-clack of the shutter. Later I went into her room ready to pick up her trade. She smiled saying she already gave it away. The following week, same thing. She finds something new, brings it home, and she’s already taken care of her trade before I walk in.
Today I come for the trade and I step through the door as she points her camera at the dollhouse on her shelf. Shish-clack … the dollhouse is gone. She turns at my gasp, eyes wide, bringing up the camera.
I put out my hand “No, pl….
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Cameron says: Before dad went to the nursing home, he told me that my son should have his camera. I promised him that when he was old enough, I would do that.
Two years later, I kept my word. It even had some film in it already and I told him that he could take some shots. He did it gleefully but looked puzzled when it stopped clicking. I explained that he’d used up the rest of the film and I was going to show him how we used to have pictures developed.
An old friend of mine was a photographer and he even had a dark room. My son was excited to watch how the pictures were developed. I saw the shots he had taken of me and his mother as well as a few good ones of the house.
And then there were the pictures taken in battle. A soldier standing over a pile of bodies like safari trophies. A woman tending the soldier’s wounds as they looked at each other. Mom and dad. They were in their early twenties.
Dad’s memory is gone and mom is long dead. I don’t know who they used to be other than what the pictures showed.
The summer after I finished second grade, the whole family came together for Great-grandma’s funeral, and then to clean out the old house where she and Great-grandpa had lived ever since they started farming. A lifetime of accumulation of belongings to be distributed or disposed of, from the ancient Monitor-top refrigerator and wringer washing machine standing forgotten in a corner of the basement to the polished-coral necklace she’d brought back from a trip to Hawaii with Senior Citizens. All of it needed to go so Cousin Bob’s family could move in and take over the operation.
Among the treasures of that old farmhouse was an antique camera that I found in one of the built-in bookcases in the living room. Everybody wanted to throw it away, considering that it’d be impossible to find film for it. Even back then, digital cameras were becoming common enough that silver halide film was being crowded out of the marketplace, except for a few specialist applications.
But Mom suggested that it would make a good camera for me to play make-believe with. So all that summer I carried it everywhere, pretending to be a photographer. One day I might imagine myself to be a news photographer, and another day I might pretend to take pictures of the flowers in the park, because the week beforehand I’d watched a nature special on TV.
When school started, I didn’t have as much time to play with it, and soon it ended up on a shelf in my bedroom. A few years later, Harris County 4-H had a workshop day, and one of the workshops was photography. We each got a cheap disposable camera, the kind you could buy at Walart or HEB for a few bucks, and spent the rest of that session taking pictures for real. At the end of the class, the instructor collected all our cameras, and about two weeks later my pictures arrived in the mail with a note that he was particularly impressed by my steady hand and my composition.
However, my folks weren’t too excited about buying me a camera, so my budding interest in photography remained dormant until I was old enough to be entrusted with my own phone. It was just a flip-phone, but it had a camera and I could download the pictures to my computer and use digital photo manipulation software on them. I even got a couple of pictures published in the school newspaper. And when we came up here to Shepardsport, a couple of thumb drives full of JPEG’s was a lot easier to fit into my personal mass allowance than envelope after envelope of old-fashioned film pictures.
Maybe all that’s why I was so excited when I heard the talk about setting up an underground newspaper to publicize the Flannigan Administration’s abuses, turning Tsar Joseph’s invitation into the Expulsions. Might it actually mean getting to do photography at a professional level?
When Autumn Belfontaine pointed out that a pirate radio station was apt to get us a lot bigger audience, we weren’t going to need a lot of photography, just enough for our website and social media presence. So I ended up being a DJ — but every now and then I’ll snap a few pics of my fellow on-air personalities and post them after a special event. It’s neat to see them under my byline, even if it’s not exactly what I’m getting paid for.
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