Introduction

In Grade School and especially throughout High School, I always had an interest in photography.  Although the funding wasn't really available to support a hobby like this, opportunities seem to avail themselves.   At that time, I always looked forward to the day when I could own and operate my own camera and, of course, have my own darkroom to develop film and print pictures and make enlargements.  This really didn't happen until I was through college and married.  The first camera I could really call my own was a cheap Brownie Hawkeye box camera with a flash.  With this camera, I took loads of black and white  pictures of  my wife, two children, and a lot of scenery.  I must digress a bit to fill in some of the earlier years.

My cousin, with whom I lived and grew up with, also had an interest in photography.  I do remember developing film in the basement of our house in the winter.  It was so cold down there, that the film and paper, when printed, did a lot of crazy thing producing some interesting effects.  But interestingly enough is the fact that I learned so very much from my cousin about film development and the art of printing pictures, even just contact prints.  The things I learned from him really helped me when I purchased my first SLR, which was a Minolta SR-1 with a 50 millimeter lens, and a Wesson light meter, which I still have to this day.

The Minolta SR-1 didn't have a built in light meter which in those days was a real disadvantage when trying to take quick pictures of kids that were active and really didn't like to pose for more than 10 seconds.  I definitely had to trade up to a camera with a built in light meter.  My choice was still in the Minolta line.  I found a second hand SRT-101.  I was in heaven.  All you had to do was match the needles and you had a perfect exposure.  Yeah, right!  I travelled some with my work with Sperry Univac, now Unisys.  One of the places I was sent was to Tokyo, Japan.  I bought an extra Minota SRT-101 body and a couple more lenses.  The lenses I bought were a 200 millimeter telephoto lens and a 28 millimeter wide angle lens.  I was ready for anything that came along!

We had two children in that period which provided ample targets for many, many pictures.  Over the years, I have taken approximately 9000 slides plus many hundreds of color and black and white prints.  The black and white shots I took provoked a memory of my cousin and I in that cold basement developing film and prints.  Needless to say, that was my next project.  A darkroom!  In our first house, the only  room that allowed that activity was a bathroom.  Not very convenient, but it had running water which is almost a necessity for an adequate darkroom.    This worked for a few years till the inconvenience of the bathroom won out.  Black and white prints were put on hold.

After living in that house for about 8 years, we moved to a larger house.  In searching for this house,  I was always watching for a place to resume my darkroom activities.  This new house had a spot under the basement stairs that was perfect but without running water.  This was overcome by the nearness of the laundry room.  Back in business!  I bought a new 35 MM SLR, a Pentaz ZX-10.  It had auto exposure as well as auto focusing.  I also purchased a zoom telephoto (70 - 210 MM).  Back in photographic heaven, so to speak.  My enlarger was enhanced by a new 50 MM Rokkor lens from Japan.  This really improved the quality of my prints.  I even dabbled in color slides a bit.  This didn't work out too well, as the chemicals weren't very stable and had to be remixed quite often.  I concentrated my activities to black and white.  Eventually, the interest in this activity died out and I more or less abandoned the dark room.

My daughter was, at the time, a flight attendent for a prominent airline.  Her boyfriend, now her husband, and I discussed digital photography a little bit.  He had researched digital cameras for quite awhile and had settled on a Nikon 990 Coolpix.  He offered his camera for me to play with for a day.   I experimented with this camera for most of the day and needless to say, I was extremely impressed with it's capabilities.  Since I was also a computer devotee and the thought of what I could do with the digital pictures really excited me.  I told him that I would really like to get a camera like this sometime.  His answer was that he would bring one home from Japan for about half of the retail price.  Sold, I told him.  I was now hooked on digital photography. Armed with a new Nikon 990 Coolpix camera, I attacked the digital photography world, so to speak.  After several years, using the Nikon, I purchased a Panasonic TZ5, which combined all the good aspects about digital cameras.  It was small and compact, yet was as versatile as my Nikon.  It has a built in intelligence that made it the perfect camera for all occasions.  It has movie clip capability with sound which adds a new dimension to all my slide shows.  I have now moved to a Sony A33, which to me is the epitome of digital cameras.  It it s DSLR with all the bells and whistles.  I keep the Panasonic handle to bring to events where the big camera is, more or less, in the way.

I've also been hooked on computers for my entire working career.  So the advent of personal computers was a godsend to my photography hobby.  I have had several PC over the years.  At the present time I have a HP computer powered with a VISTA operating system.  I bought a Canon 8000F scanner that was capable of scanning my vast collection of slides plus many, many albums of prints of pictures that I had taken over the years.  There were also some color negatives that I scanned because the prints for them were lost.  Why I saved the negatives, I'll never know.  After scanning some of the negatives, I now know what I saved them.  I feel bad about the negatives that got away.  Grrr.

I have also acquired several pieces of software to augment my camera hobby.  Among these are Picasa, Adobe Picture (almost a predecessor to PhotoShop), and various other tidbits of sotware that make digital picture management fun.  I have also acquired a slide show program, produced by Muvee, that will burn a DVD that is playable on a DVD player as well as on a computer.  This is a great way of sharing photographs with friends and relatives.

A couple of years ago, my cousin and I undertook putting together a history of our grandfather's family (Leum Family History).  This included pictures as well as write-up of each family member.  The pictures were dug out of attics around the US.  The words for the history book were written by my cousin's mother some 50 to 60 years ago.  We were fortunate to run across the write-ups at the opportune time which became the backbone of our history book.  With book basically in shape, the pictues were inserted at the most meaniful locations.  We've included other items,  that were pertinent to the times.  Some were written by other descendants.  The result of the effort was, in my opinion, a magnificent document.  I'm sure that other family's have similar documents, but maybe not to this detail..  This effort spurred me on to putting together a family history for my mother's parents as well (Findahl Family History).  This also was an effort that required input from most of the descendants.

This past December we put both the documents on the Internet for all the relatives and others view.  We are still performing updates and fine tuning, as necessary, to each of the documents.