Some recent good news has spurred me to start digging through all the remaining memorabilia that i’d not already got rid of. Most particularly going through my collection of slides and photos that started when i got my first 35mm camera in 1957, a task that i’d been putting off for decades even though i’d made it much easier by throwing away unreviewed all of my later photos during my Depression of 2002. Didn’t throw out the earlier material because it was in a different place and i was too depressed to find it.
This time, I dug out my old projector and set to work looking at the slides. There were some surprises, the first being that i took so few photos most of my life. For example, one roll of film was enough to cover all five years i spent teaching at Midland College, which is not so much a comment on me as on Midland. Worse yet, not a single shot there was worth looking at twice.
The only period during which i took a lot of photos was during my stay in Europe when i was in the Army 64-66, and i came home with several hundred. What amazed me as i reviewed them was that i was able to recall in the great majority of instances the city in which they were taken and quite often, the name of the building i was photographing. Virtually all of my photos were of architecture and landscape, and i had neither talent nor good equipment, so even though looking at the photos gave me the joy of remembering my travels, the only ones worth saving were some i took of the Keukenhof in April, ’66 and which i retrofitted into my coverage of the Keukenhof 39 years later during one of my stays in Amsterdam when the flowers were just as lovely, but the trees were 39 years taller. See Amsterdam by Foot and scroll down to “Zondag 15 mei 2005 – Keukenhof”.
Even back then i was reluctant to take photos of people, so it came as no surprise that i found precious few of my friends and family in the fifties and sixties, but there were a handful that i’ll be converting to tifs and attaching to emails as soon as i can figure out how to use the slide to file feature on my scanner.
Meanwhile, here’s a photo that was taken when i was rafting the South Fork of the American River in about ’83. The young woman to my right is clearly howling with delight over the time of her life, but my head was down for more leverage as i paddled for our lives.
