That's the question lots of people ask me. My answers range from, "forever," to "over forty years,"
to "depends on what you mean." I usually tell people that Joy, my lovely wife, bought me my first 35 mm SLR for our first wedding anniversary in 1971 and it's been a love affair with the camera since then. It became an obsessive hobby and I began photographing weddings and portraits for money in the mid 1970s to help support my hobby. As you know, photography can get expensive.
But, the story really goes back even farther than that. I don't really remember the first time I got to use the family camera, but I do remember what camera it was -- a Brownie Hawkeye, built in the early '60s. My mom liked to take family photos of my dad and family of four boys and this was the camera that she used to make many of those photos. Lately I've been on a project to scan all of our old family images and store them digitally. I love the way we were usually posed in front of the family car. My dad worked for the Studebaker and one is often prominent in our family photos.
Another common theme is the Christmas morning photo of our living room showing us marveling at all the good things that Santa had left the night before. It's usually a photo of me and my brothers standing around in our under pants. I guess we never wore pajamas.
All this to say, the Brownie Hawkeye had a great influence on the path I would eventually take. Below is a photo I made of my maternal grandparents on Dauphin Island in the mid 1960s with that camera. Then there are the close ups showing the camera today. When I was a cub scout, my mom finally gave me that camera. You can see where she wrote my name and troop number on it with India Ink. We didn't have Sharpies in those days. You can see by the electrical tape repair that I made many years ago that the camera was well used.
I still have it. It sits on a shelf in our studio. I'm not even sure if you can buy film for it any more, but it still means a lot to me.
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