We (actually mostly my wife) recently began the process of scanning thousands of old photographs that we inherited or which have been sitting in closets. They range from snapshots from relatives on both sides of the family to serious photographs we made back in the BD (“before digital”) era – many slides, a good number of prints, and some negatives. There are tons of treasures buried in all of piles of images, and rediscovering them is a pleasure.

Today she came across two photographs of me from a long ago time. I think I must have been about 16 years old. I probably felt pretty grown up at the time but, man, do I look young! I’m almost certain that my father, Richard S Mitchell, made these photographs, and they appear to have been shot somewhere in our yard – the flowers look like my mother’s garden.

My father was a talented and enthusiastic amateur photographer who owned a succession of interesting and, for the era, modern cameras. As we earned his trust, he loaned some of them to us. (In retrospect, I wonder if he was doing so partly so that he would simply have to upgrade his own cameras so that the kids would have cameras. I now understand that mode of thinking quite well. ;-) He also had an enlarger and could set up a sort of impromptu darkroom in the bathroom, where he gave me my first lessons on black and white printing.

I am pretty certain that the occasion of these photographs was my acquisition of the first “good camera” that I purchased with my own hard-earned funds, by saving up my allowance, yard-mowing money, and funds earned by sharing a paper route with a neighborhood kid. I believe that it was a Minolta SRT-101, a nice basic film SLR that I purchased with a good little 50mm lens and to which I eventually added the little clip-on external light meter. Perhaps I’m reading into the two photographs, but I see two different aspects of my response to the new camera. In the first photo, it almost looks like I’m attempting to strike what I probably thought was the appropriate pose for the young photographic artiste that I undoubtedly imagined myself to be. In the second, I think I’ve let down my guard, and I seem to be gazing at my new camera with some combination of pleasure and surprise that I actually own the thing! :-)

© Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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