PHOTOGRAPHY

My Photography Bio

Around the tender age of ten, my maternal grandmother gave me a little Savoy box camera. I took some photos on vacations and such. Then one day, inspired no doubt by photographs in National Geographic Magazine, I shot a roll or two of some semi-wild squirrels my family had rescued when the rodents’ tree had come down in a storm. Not surprising to anyone but me, the photos didn’t show much, as the squirrels were so far away from the camera. My mother, incensed at putting out hard-earned money for drug store developing of images of tiny black splotches, laid down the law: future photography expenses would be paid by me. I put the camera away on a high shelf.

A year or so later, my interest in railroads led me to a fraternity of similar minded folks about my age. They often shared prints of trains they had photographed. I had to be a part of it! Scraping together some allowance money, I bought a roll of 620 black-and-white film and rode my bike the half mile down to the train tracks. I knew the eastbound Louisville section of the Chesapeake & Ohio’s George Washington was due, and shot my first railroad image as the train passed. When I got the photos back, the shot was bifurcated with each half receiving a different exposure. (Years later I would fix that easily with Photoshop.) It didn’t matter—I had started a hobby of a lifetime.

My father, who used an Argus 35mm camera (which I was disallowed to even touch) to shoot his photos of trains, would take the family on rail-related adventures. When my brother expressed a similar interest, he and I ended up sharing the box camera with the inevitable arguments that such a rivalry engenders. To silence the unrest, my mother offered me her folding Kodak which had been unused for years. Not only did this camera offer an astounding top shutter speed of 1/125th second, it also permitted “Bulb” time exposures. After school one day, Mom drove me to a neighboring train depot where I photographed engines badly damaged in a collision with a rock slide. I sent off the drug store print to Trains Magazine, and at the age of fourteen, my first photograph was published.

Moving to New Jersey, I stumbled upon the darkroom adjacent to my high school chemistry classroom, and I became intrigued with the mysteries therein. My clamoring for knowledge to improve my photography resulted in my parents spending considerably more than they had for processing a few years earlier. Not only did they furnish a crude darkroom in a closet in our laundry room, but they enrolled me in The Famous Photographers’ School, a correspondence course. I absorbed the information in the textbooks, but was less than diligent in submitting the assignments for grading. Some perhaps unfiltered critiques of early assignments probably didn’t help. But other things were going on.

My first job out of high school was to work in a camera shop—the only job I coveted. (No stocking grocery shelves for this guy!) I didn’t yet have a car, so I rode that same bicycle mentioned above the two miles to the store, the Kodak strapped around my neck, and approached the owner. Perhaps more out of sympathy than need, he offered me a job “to vacuum the floors and dust the shelves.” Within months, I had a car and my set of keys to the store. I flexed my work schedule around my college classes, working alone on Wednesdays to give the manager a second day off, and responding to let the police in when the alarm went off in the middle of the night.

Even before I obtained my car, aboard my bicycle I rolled up to a traffic accident one afternoon. I took a few photos, dropping them off at the police station a few days later. The police chief asked for my phone number. My eight-year old Rambler was obtained about the same time as a brand new Practika 35mm single lens reflex (SLR). Then the phone began to ring at night. Could I respond to the scene of an accident, fire, or raid with my camera? I was getting paid for my photos.

But it didn’t end there. Customers at the camera store frequently asked for passport photos, as the previous owner had offered such a service. My boss wasn’t interested, but he offered me a concession. At $5 a pop, I would shoot the mug shots in front of a screen, and process them in my darkroom for next day delivery. Even on nights when I had late classes at the college, I would swing by the store on the way home to see if there was any film to be developed. Quite honestly, it tended to diminish my enjoyment of working in the darkroom—but the money was good. Buying equipment at dealer cost, I upgraded my Tilt-a-Mite flashgun to an electronic flash model, obtained a tripod (that I still use 50 years later), lenses, and many other accessories, not to mention film, chemicals, and paper. Additionally, customers would inquire at the store about a photographer, and I began to shoot portraits, legal, advertising, and commercial photography assignments. I also shot high school football games on Saturdays for the team’s booster club as well as being a stringer for a local newspaper. I was always hopping.

Meanwhile, on the railroad front, through the store I met Bob Pennisi and later, his brother, Rich, both excellent rail photographers. Through outings with them I improved my craft. They were both advocates of medium format photography, which led me to purchase a Graflex twin lens reflex, and later a Koni-Omega M rangefinder roll-film camera. The latter was developed as a wedding camera, but I found it ideal for trains. Bob shot black and white almost exclusively. A few years later, when he published a series of books on predecessor railroads to Conrail, he approached me for color photos for the books’ covers. I supplied him with five images which served as front or rear cover illustrations for three of those books.

At the same time, I took advantage of my contacts through the store and bought a dealer demonstration model of the Topcon Super D 35mm SLR. This was my all-time favorite 35mm camera, which I chose over Nikon’s FTn, which was the premier 35mm of the day. I wore that Topcon out over the next ten years.

I was ready to upgrade the Koni-Omega with additional lenses, but the camera’s film advance system had issues in both of the interchangeable backs I owned. That fact, and a growing commercial business where a SLR had advantages over the rangefinder Koni, led me to consider my options. With college graduation—and the end of my photography store employment—looming, I again took advantage of discount prices to obtain a Mamiya RB67 with three lenses: a 90mm “normal,” a 50mm wide-angle, and a 150mm telephoto lens. I had to sell the Koni, but recovered every cent I paid for it prior to several years of use.

The job market of the mid-seventies was a tough one, particularly in the railroad industry, my chosen path. Photography work I had done for local police departments led to volunteer work for one of the departments. After striking out at several railroads, I accepted a patrolman’s job with Chester Township Police. One of the requirements of graduating the police academy was to write a major term paper. I chose the subject of police photography, providing the history, major relevant court cases, and other evidentiary considerations of photography for law enforcement. This paper came to the attention of the academy’s director, and I later taught several classes to police officers on the essentials of police photography.

From police work I moved on to the insurance industry, and after earning my MBA in Accounting, I went into the IT and then the petroleum industries. In most of my jobs, I incorporated photography whenever I could, be it taking keepsake photos at retirement dinners or recording claims to mitigate settlement costs. I would also use photography from time to time in my final career as an IT consultant.

When the Super D started to fail, I was at a loss as to what to do. Topcon had gone out of business, and buying a used one would just forestall the inevitable. A fellow worker mentioned one day that he had a Canon AE1 he was looking to sell. The price was reasonable, and it gave me a chance to work with that design, although I still wanted to obtain a more professional model. I compared Nikon to Canon, and selected the latter because it just felt better in my hands. Canon’s F model had few features to convince me to select it over their A model, and I ended up going with that. Whereas I had 28mm, 50, and 135 prime lenses for the Topcon (duplicated in essence with the RB67 medium format camera), with the Canon I went for a 28-135mm zoom lens, making the kit lighter and more portable. That was the reason to have a 35mm camera, because the RB67--weighing in at about six pounds and with a hefty footprint inside a suitcase—was really a studio camera that I was using in the field, but not on airplane trips or other times when I didn’t feel like a cardio workout just to take some photos.

In the mid-2000’s, digital photography was making huge technological advances, and it became clear that the days of film were numbered. Fearing that the resale value of my gear would begin to plummet, I traded in my Mamiya and Canon kits which netted enough to purchase a Canon Rebel XT and a pair of zoom lenses. A week after using the camera—and perhaps more importantly, the post-processing software—I knew I would never go back to film. A couple of years later I upgraded to the Canon 60D, primarily to obtain some higher ISO values, even though its 6400 max is nothing to the 20,000+ of some of today’s models. I am playing with the idea of upgrading once again, but so far I am mostly content.

Nature photography—and subjects like those squirrels that got me in trouble with my Mom sixty years ago—have always captivated me. While I did some macro work with insects and such, photography of birds and mammals remained elusive. I once spent a hundred bucks for a Spiratone 400mm f/6.3 lens, but its lack of quality only proved more frustrating. Once retired, and realizing that I will only live once and that I’m on the downward slope of that curve, I bought a used Tamron 150-600mm lens, and spend a few hours of every week getting my money’s worth out of it. I still shoot trains, of course, having done so in most of the 50 states and a dozen countries around the world. The joy of realizing I’ve “nailed it” has never diminished.