60 Years of Photography

Actually, it hasn't been quite 60 years, but close enough. In 1952 (I was 8 years old) when I decided that I wanted to have a camera and take pictures. Dad was quite interested in photography, and that probably helped to stir my interest. A few years before, he had bought a Kodak 35 and shot Kodachrome slides. I loved having slide shows. It was almost a good as going to the movies. He also had lots of old black and white photos that he had made. Some of them were very good. Now and then, he would set up a darkroom in our kitchen and make contact prints. Watching the image come up in the developer seemed like magic.

My first photo -- my dad

The first camera that I had was a throwaway camera about as basic as it gets. It was a cardboard box with a shutter and lens and a spool of film with 8 exposures. When all of the photos were all taken, you mailed the camera back and they sent you your prints. I took most of mine on a family weekend in Yosemite. They look  pretty good, considering how primitive my equipment was.

Then a couple of months later, I got a real camera for my birthday. It was an Argus 75. It was a fixed focus point-and-shoot camera much like a Kodak Brownie but with a twin-lens viewfinder. It used a roll of 620 film, and produced 2-1/4 inch square photos. I used it for several years taking pictures of neighborhood friends, vacations, whatever. Many of my shots came out all right, but I really had little idea of what made one picture better than another. I was mostly just concerned about capturing my subject, and had no concept of photography as art. But I did like looking at pictures. I loved looking at all the photos in Life magazine, and I suppose I must have had some understanding that there was something special about those photos that made me want to look at them.

Typical shot on backpacking trip

When I was 11, I joined a Boy Scout troop. Troop 204 in Lafayette was no ordinary troop. They took scouting more seriously than most. Their uniforms were different, they had more activities, parents were more involved, and boys usually stayed with the troop through high school. Every summer, they went on a 10-12 day backpacking trip in the High Sierra. My first trip was pretty hard on me, a scrawny little kid. But after a few days I got used to it, and fell in love with the high mountains. The following couple of years I took my camera along, and enjoyed taking photos of all the great scenery.

I think it was around the time I started high school that I became aware of the photography of Ansel Adams by seeing a couple of his books. I loved his photos and I wanted to take shots like his. I began borrowing my dad's Kodak 35 and shooting some Kodachrome. It was a better camera, but now I had to be concerned about focus and exposure settings and there was more room for error. Focusing was a matter of using a split-image rangefinder, or just guessing at the distance setting. Exposure was a matter of making an educated guess about the shutter speed and f-stop settings. We didn't have a light meter until dad bought a hand held unit several years later. After doing that on one of the scout backpacking trips, I was kind of disappointed with my shots. I realized that I knew very little about taking good pictures.

Scout trip campfire

Dad had an old copy of a book published by Kodak entitled "How to Take Good Pictures". I read it thoroughly and started trying to apply what I had learned. Even though our copy of the book was about 20 years old, photography had not changed much in that time and it helped me a lot. I learned some of the basics about light and lenses and film, and did quite a bit of experimenting with shutter and f-stop settings to get different effects. I also picked up some ideas about composition, and started thinking about how to arrange things in a photo.

Close-up with the folding Kodak

I began looking for books on photography in the library, and I came across Ansel Adams "Basic Photo Series". I read through all of the books and picked up what I could from it. A lot of it was beyond my understanding, but I really wanted to be able to use his methods. The trouble was, many of his methods didn't work without using a large-format view camera. His instructions about using lens swings and tilts didn't work if your lens didn't move. His zone system for exposure depended on varying the film development time, which was not possible if your camera used roll film.

I also began looking for books of photos by other photographers. I looked at most of the famous photographers of that time. I especially noticed Alfred Steiglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Edward Weston. I began to appreciate the incredible range of possibliites, the many different kinds of subjects, the different styles. They were nearly all black and white photos, and I started using a lot more black and white film. I saw that I could have a lot more control of the image by doing my own developing and printing.

Dad's Kodak 35 was better suited to shooting Kodachrome than black and white, so I started using another of his cameras, a Kodak folding camera that was quite old. It used 620 roll film like my Argus and produced 2-1/4 x 3-1/2 inch negatives. I bought several filters, and began experimenting with their effect with black and white film. At first, I didn't bother trying to do my own developing, but as I got more into it, I wanted an enlarger.

Whenever I could, I went into a camera store in Walnut Creek where one of the salesmen knew a lot about photography, and he was patient with my questions. He sold me a big old enlarger for about $40, and I started playing around with it a lot at home. I also talked with him a lot about cameras, and what kind I would need to follow Ansel Adams system. He suggested an old Speed Graphic, the classic newspaper photographer's camera, which would allow me to shoot sheet film. But I couldn't see myself carrying around a camera that large, and the idea of using sheet film and carrying around film holders seemed impossibly tedious.

I stuck with both of dads cameras until I was out of high school, using the 35mm for slides, and the folding camera for black and white. Then I went on a Sierra Club Labor Day weekend trip to climb Banner Peak, and used the folding camera. I must have been too rough on it, because my pictures all were out of focus. The mechanics were pretty delicate, and I think I bent something so that it didn't fold out right anymore.

Back road near Davis, 1965

So I went back to the camera store and bought a used Rolleiflex for $100. That was a major purchase for me, and it was the first time I had ever carried that much in cash. The camera had several limitations. One was the 2-1/4 inch square format. By now, I was used to a rectangular format, which I preferred. So I had to compose shots with the idea of cropping them later with the enlarger. Another limitation was the fixed lens with a fairly wide field of view. At the time, I really wanted to be able to take telephoto shots, and I couldn't do that except by using my enlarger to zoom in on part of the negative. I got a close-up lens attachment, but it was difficult to use because of the twin lens focusing. I could make it work if I used a tripod, composed and focused my shot, then lowered the camera by the distance between lenses. But I usually didn't want to bother with a tripod. I couldn't use Ansel Adams zone system because it used roll film.

Pioneer Basin, 1967

But the quality of the camera was much higher than I had ever used before, and that more than made up for its limitations. For most situations, it was easy to use, and I could get some incredibly sharp photos. At the time, I didn't try to make prints larger than 8x10, but years later, I got some larger developing trays and did a few 16x 20 prints from  those negatives that are nice and sharp.

By this time, I was in college at UC Davis, and between my school work and other interests, I didn't spend so much time on photography. But went back to it now and then, and my pictures got steadily better. When I began medical school at UC San Francisco, I made friends with a guy in the dorm who was also interested in photography and he inspired me to spend more time on it. He told me about a photography center in Duboce Park that he went to for developing and enlarging, and I started going too. They had a room with a couple of dozen enlargers in cubicles around tables with developing trays. I can't remember whether it cost anything, but it couldn't have been much. The prints went through a large dryer and dropped into a trough where everybody's prints were mixed together. It was a very social experience, sharing comments about other people's photos, and although I was shy about it at first, I got to like it.

In Golden Gate Park around 1967

Ocean Beach, San Francisco, 1967

My photography began to expand beyond scenic nature shots. I don't know whether it was my friend, the people at the photo center, or photography magazines that I was reading, but I began to shoot more urban scenes and especially people. Since I was very shy, taking candid shots of people was very difficult for me, but I pushed my self to do it. I also started to look for more experimental and abstract shots. This was mostly a result of the times. It was 1966 and 67, and I was only a few blocks from the Haight Ashbury district. My old friends from Davis had introduced me to pot and acid, and everybody seemed to be getting stoned and making crazy far-out art. I experimented with solarizing prints and combining multiple images, anything I could do to make something look psychedelic. I liked the idea of making high contrast images that were mostly just shapes in black and white. I started using Agfa grade 6 paper for printing, the highest contrast paper I could find.


For a long time, I had wished that I could go beyond the limitations of a fixed lens, and so I bought the cheapest SLR that I could find, a Mamiya Secor, with a 28mm and a 135mm lens. It was actually a pretty decent camera, and now I was free of a lot of limitations, including the need for a hand-held light meter. I was really enjoying my photography now, and spending more time on it even with the demands of medical school.

That lasted for a couple of years or so, and then one night, while I was visiting friends, someone stole the camera out of my car. It was quite a blow, and my dad took pity on me and offered to buy me a new camera. He had found out about some way to buy cameras from Hong Kong and get a good deal. The only thing was that when I picked it up at the airport, the customs inspectors made me grind off the brand name. That didn't really bother me. I didn't care what the camera looked like as long as it worked. It was a Topcon D-1, with two lenses like my stolen camera, a 28mm and a 135mm. It was a better camera than the Mamiya Secor, with sharp lenses and easy-to-use controls, and I loved it.

On Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 1969

Around this time, I wasn't doing so well in school, and I realized that my heart really wasn't in it. Being a doctor always had sounded like a good idea, but it was never really my idea. I had no passion for it. So I dropped out, spent six months or so hanging around at home and looking for a job. I spent several days working with a portrait photographer shooting head shots for church directories. It was assembly line work, trying to move people through and get their pictures as fast as possible. I wanted a job, but this was too much, and I quit. I finally got a job as a chemist in a glue factory and moved into an apartment in Berkeley. I was pretty lonely, and for lack of anything else to do, I spent a lot of time wandering around Telegraph Avenue and the campus taking pictures.

Then after a few months, I answered a note on a bulletin board from a drummer looking for musicians, and I got very involved with music. After playing together a few times, the drummer and I found a house to rent on Gilman Street, and we spent the next couple of years playing with various bands and having a great time. But my photography got kind of put on the back burner for a while.

It wasn't too long before I was back into it again. When a friend, Maureen, from Southern California split up with her husband, Larry, she and I ended up together. She moved in with me, we moved to Oakland, and ten months later we got married. She got a job with the Welfare Department, and I was bored with the glue factory, so I quit.

I didn't have a very clear idea what I was going to do except that I wanted to try to make some money with photography. I had noticed that people were selling framed photos on the street and at crafts fairs, and I wanted to try it. I also tried taking photos of friends and selling them but that didn't get me very far. I figured that in order to make a profit on framed prints, I would need to be able to produce them cheaply. Our rented house had a dirt floored basement, and I cleared out a corner of it and made a crude darkroom and workshop out of it. I bought a better enlarger and some inexpensive equipment to develop color prints from negatives. I figured out a way to make my own frames. I made some masonite display boards. I printed up some of my best shots and took them over to the Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I found out about several crafts fairs, and went to them too. I sold a few, but not nearly enough to make any profit. There were other problems too. My cheap glued together frames tended to fall apart. I had dry-mounted my prints to board and after a few hours in the sun, they started peeling off. So after several months and maybe half a dozen shows, I gave up.

Meanwhile, I had a few other ideas. I thought maybe we should join the hippie exodus that was taking place, people moving out into the country to live off the land. I had a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog, and we read the magazine, "Mother Earth News", and they were full of ways to get by in the country without a lot of money. I even thought of going out into the wilderness and living in a tent. It was a time when a whole lot of people were looking for new ways to live, ways to escape from the rat race and find more meaningful work.

One idea that I had was to do a book of photos, maybe with some kind of inspirational text. Then I thought of writing a book, some kind of "how to" book. I started writing something about music theory for rock and roll, but quickly realized that I didn't really know enough about it. I tried to think of a subject that I knew a lot about, and then it came to me that I could write about hiking trails in the East Bay. I started right in, writing about the parks that I was familiar with.

Cover shot for East Bay Trails, 1973

About this time, we decided to have a kid, and Maureen got pregnant. I was soon going to have a family to support, and I started looking for a job. I was either over- or under-qualified for many jobs, but that wasn't a problem with the Post Office. They didn't care about my long hair either. I took the test four times and finally got a high enough score to get a job as a letter carrier in Oakland.

I kept working on the book, and decided that it should have photos too. I already had a lot of them that I could use, but I took my camera along whenever I went out on a trail. This was kind of a new angle on photography for me — taking pictures with an editorial purpose rather than just for art's sake. I liked this new approach. After a year or so of working on it, I finally had a rough manuscript together, and I took it around to several local publishers. None were interested, but then I discovered that some people had successfully published their own books. I found a printer, Dharma Press, that would be willing to produce my book for a reasonable price, and they helped me find a typesetter and got me starting learning about graphic design and pasteup.

I found some help in books, and from people that I met, but mostly I just figured out how to do on my own. I later learned many better ways to do it, but I managed to get it done. I spent many hours drawing maps with a Rapidograph pen and rub on type. I finally finished the book, and got it printed. I think I had 1000 copies printed for a little over a dollar a copy. I took it around to local book stores, and many were willing to carry it. It was priced at $5 a piece, and the book stores got a 40 percent discount. After a year or so, I found a distributor, Book People, to carry it. They got a larger discount, but they saved me the trouble of delivering books to stores. It turned out to be a modest success. Over a period of 7 or 8 years, I revised the book three times, and sold a total of around 15,000 copies. I would have kept it up, but by that time I had two kids and a stressful job requiring lots of overtime, and the idea of revising the book again seemed like too much work.

Then I had some more bad luck. We were living in East Oakland, off High Street near Brookdale Park, and some kids broke into our house and stole all of my cameras. The also got our TV, stereo, and a couple of guitars. I replaced the Topcon D-1 with a similar but larger camera, a D-2.

Glacier Peak Wilderness, 1977

After three years at the Post Office, I was tired of it, and Maureen was working again, so I quit and stayed home with two-year-old Aaron for a while. I read the book, "What Color Is Your Parachute", and realized that just working for a paycheck was not enough, and I should figure out what I really wanted to do. I followed some of the book's suggestions, and after many months of thinking about it, I decided that I wanted to be a graphic designer. I had already had a little experience with it putting my book together, and I had enjoyed it. I took a class at the Castro Valley Adult School on graphic design and paste-up, and then began looking for a job. In the meantime, I had started attending meetings of a couple of local environmental groups that wanted to save from development some of the beautiful hills in the area. I began to look for photos that would be useful in that effort. I designed some brochures and spent months creating a slide show for one of these groups.

Lyell Fork of the Merced, 1976

Pachena Bay, Vancouver Island, 1977

Our second son was on his way when I found a job at a small print shop, Gum Street Inc., in San Mateo. I was hired to do typesetting and pasteup, but they also needed someone to do camera work and stripping. That sounded like fun too. I had not forgotten that years before, while working summer jobs at my dad's plant, Shell Development Co. in Emeryville, I had seen the graphics department, and marveled at the camera that they used, one that filled a room. At Gum Street, I was soon using a smaller vertical graphics camera, and learning how to shoot half tones, strip negatives and burn plates. There was another guy working part-time doing design, typesetting and paste-up, and he showed me how to do it, but for the prepress work, I was mostly on my own. I learned a bit about stripping by looking through the files of old jobs. There was a lot of stuff I really didn't do correctly, I just figured out a way to get it done. Luckily, the shop didn't do much high-quality work.

Plaskett Lake, Northern Coast Range

After a year, I found another job at Olympic Screen Crafts, in Fremont. They did a lot of screen printing as well and some small press offset printing. I did much the same kind of work as before, but then the art department manager quit, and they gave me the job. The company was growing fast, and over about 10 years, my department grew to about 20 people. Besides keeping up with a growing business, we had to try to keep up with technology, which was just starting to undergo an amazing revolution. Over the 15 year period that I was at Olympic, most graphics production changed from being done by hand to being done by personal computers. Luckily, I was interested in learning about computers and I managed to keep up with the changes. Quite a few people that I worked with didn't do that and found themselves out of work.

Ebbetts Pass, early 80's

During this time, I was under a lot of pressure from the job — working long hours, obsessing about how to fix problems, trying to deal with a bunch of disgruntled, underpaid employees — and raising two boys at home, and I didn't get around to spending much time on photography. But I did keep it up when I could on weekends and vacations. I was always trying to figure out how to take better photos. I think the years of working with graphic design and prepress must have had an impact on my approach to photography. It probably made me look at my photos with a much more critical eye, to see all of their imperfections. With the demands of job and family, I was taking a lot more quick snapshots to record events rather than taking the time to be artistic. My pictures may not have gotten any better, but at least I was more aware of it.

In 1984, Maureen and I were planning a trip to Hawaii, and we thought that it was time to get a newer camera, one that she could use too. We bought a Minolta X-570 SLR with a 28-80 mm zoom lens. I loved not having to carry around an extra lens or two. It turned out that Maureen never used the camera much, but it became the only camera for me.


Over the years, I found that my pictures underwent subtle changes. For many years, I was trying to focus my attention on particular objects or areas of a scene to make an interesting composition. Then I began to think more about showing a whole environment, to bring the viewer into the action rather than standing back and looking at it. I went from using my telephoto lens a lot to using a wide angle lens more. And I found that to use a wide angle lens effectively, I usually had to get closer to my subject, to include something interesting in the foreground rather than focusing on a distant view. My ideas about composition changed a bit too. Some time in the early 70s, I remember seeing some interesting photos in a magazine. The were very powerful photos, but the composition was not classically centered and balanced like what I was used to. I started trying to think beyond some of the old-fashioned ideas that I had been working with. My sense of a balanced composition was pretty firmly entrenched, so I probably didn't go too far with this, but I kept it in mind.


My last few years at Olympic were not much fun. They kept taking away parts of my responsibilities and giving them to other departments. I finally quit and found a job doing computer prepress work at a large color separation house. Three months later, they went out of business, a victim of changing technology. I had a couple of other jobs doing prepress work, and finally got pretty good at it. Giving up supervising other employees was a big relief, and since then I've been much happier with my work.

Picadilly Circus, London, 1995

One of the advantages of doing prepress work was that I became an expert at using Photoshop. Even before digital cameras became practical and affordable, a lot could be done on the computer to improve scanned images. When digital cameras first began to appear, I doubted that they could ever approach the quality of film. But when I began to see some amazing digital photos, I soon changed my mind.

In 2000, Maureen and I were planning a trip to England and Ireland, and I wanted a smaller camera. In 1995 we had done a similar trip with the boys and carrying around my large Minolta SLR seemed a bit awkward. I thought about getting a digital camera, but they were still kind of expensive, and I found a small Pentax 35 mm with a zoom lens, and it worked out well. Most of the time I really didn't miss through-the-lens viewing, and I got lots of good shots. I put the camera to good use the following year, when a friend and I hiked the John Muir Trail. When you carry everything on your back for 200 miles, saving a few pounds can make a big difference.

Forester Pass on John Muir Trail, 2001

By 2003, I felt it was finally time to go digital, and bought a Minolta Dimage 7i, a five megapixel camera with a built-in lens with a zoom range similar to what I was used to. You couldn't really call it an SLR, but the viewfinder image was a small LCD screen, so I did see what came through the lens. The lens was quite large for that kind of camera, so it did pretty well in low light situations. It allowed me to shoot images in a "raw" format, but I soon

One of my first digital photos, Point Reyes, 2003

found that for me, it was a waste of storage space. I could see very little difference between the raw format and the standard jpeg compression. Besides, memory was still kind of expensive. I spent about $300 for a 512 mb compact flash card which allowed me to shoot about 250 shots in the jpeg format. It was great that I was no longer limited by 24 or 36 exposure rolls of film (of which I carried about 20 on the John Muir Trail), but I was still concerned about running out of space when we were on vacations. Battery life turned out to be a bigger concern when we were out camping. I learned to turn the camera off immediately after every shot, and never review images in the lcd screen to make the batteries last longer.

Even when I was still using film, I had already started playing around with things I could do to improve images. I cleaned up dirt specks, lightened and darkened images, did some color correction. At work, I had had plenty of experience with modifying images and I put those skills to use with some of my own. At one family gathering, my aunt wanted a photo of me and all of my cousins together. But one of the cousins wasn't there, so I got a shot of him another time and put him into the photo. One of the most challenging jobs at work was a large photo of a young woman in a bathing suit and a lei around her neck. The client didn't want the lei, so I removed it and rebuilt a large area of her chest so that it looked pretty natural.

A High Dynamic Range composite from two exposures

A Photoshop composite image

I found one the most useful Photoshop controls to be the Shadow/Highlight adjustment. It made it possible to make some pretty decent photos in high-contrast lighting situations by exposing for the highlights and then trying to fix the shadows in Photoshop. But I also discovered that I could go way beyond the contrast range of my film or my digital sensor by shooting two or more shots of the same scene with different exposure settings, and combine them later in Photoshop. I figured that out before I ever heard about other photographers creating high dynamic range photos that way, and before there was software to make it easier. I still find that I get much better results when I work it out with layers and masking than by using the HDR features now built into Photoshop.

Several years ago, in 2007, my Minolta just stopped working, so I got an Olympus E510 digital SLR with two zoom lenses, a 28-80 and an 80-300 (35 mm equivalents). It was the most compact digital SLR available, and the lenses were very compact too. Besides, it was a good deal less expensive than an equivalent Canon or Nikon. I was especially concerned with size because I wanted to use it for hiking and backpacking. It has worked out quite well for me.

Barrel Racing

Six years ago, Maureen and I bought a horse, and then a year later, another horse was given to us. So we became very involved with the horse world and that brought some new photographic challenges. We went to a lot of rodeo and gymkhana events and tried to take pictures of our friends competing. I had never done a lot of sports photography, and getting good shots of a fast moving horse is not easy. But we did get some good ones. I say we, because Maureen now takes a lot of photos too, and has become pretty good at it. An even greater challenge is taking photos while riding. We do a lot of trail rides, and there are usually lots of possibilities for good shots. The hard part is getting your horse to get into the right position and stand still. As soon as I raise a camera, the horse knows that I'm not paying much attention to him, so he does whatever he feels like, which is usually to walk or run away. For this kind of shot, I usually use Maureen's little Canon point and shoot camera, which is small enough to put in a pocket.