Photographic Images

Many of these images are being seen for the first time in over 40 years.

The thing I love about old photos is the sense of history they capture. Not history in the sense of great events, although I have captured a few of those, but the common every day kinds of things that go on in the lives of millions of people everywhere around the world. I think it is a noble cause to capture history, brief moments of time, images of people and how they were on that particular day at that time in their lives.

Lately I've been publishing a lot of photos on Facebook. Many of them are old photos that I've taken over the years, or photos of me in my early college days. I worked my way through some of those years as a student / photojournalist. I always had to work to put myself through school. I had some help from my parents, but not a lot. They had adopted five kids during the time I was still in school so they were in no position to be able to help me much. Fortunately I've been into photography since beginning classes in high school. This was long before the invention of the digital camera. This was back in the days where all still photography was still done using film. This was when the beginning photographer either had to have plenty of extra cash to be able to afford to get the photo processing and printing done by a photo lab or needed to have access and knowledge of how to develop and print photographs on their own.

I  had taken a home study course in photography beyond my high school classes. So I was ready and eager to approach the college student newspaper and begin a job as a budding photojournalist. It also helped that I could spell with some accuracy. I began to shoot photo assignments every week, developing my own film, printing my own images for the school's weekly newspaper. It was gratifying to know that thousands of people were seeing and being informed by my images week after week. I enjoyed the work. This idea of getting out of the office and into the lives and working environments of all kinds of people was rewarding personally as part of my development at that time.

 Eventually I worked my way up to Photography Editor on the small community college newspaper, and then later transferred over to a bigger university where I continued with the photojournalism. In the end I had to leave the student path to help my parents with their five adopted kids. During that time I also pursued some of my more artistic talents in music and recording. So much was being accomplished in my young life that even though I wasn't making much money, I was getting to do what I loved and to travel and spend time with some of my best friends. This was all a very creative time for me.

Now, fast forward about 30 years and I have a couple of boxes full of 35 mm film images, many of which have never been published any where, and many of them have never even been printed. So now that I'm going through these boxes, digitizing the images, I'm finding some real gems I didn't even know existed. It has been a real adventure to find and share some of these unknown images. I'll be doing more in the days ahead.

Over the years I've also been developing as an artist by learning to draw. I'm just beginning to create a series of cartoon characters, images as panels, which I'll display here as well. I imagine at some point I'll get a dedicated space to house my many art images. But for now I'll be posting some of them here. I hope you enjoy them.  Please comment if you feel so inclined.

See a collection of my work here: http://tinyurl.com/qegxxub