The Darkroom….

Or why we still need the lights out in the digital age.

Dabbling in photography for me has been a very rewarding experience. I actually started leaning towards photography the day I discovered I could draw with some degree of artistry. Not a Van Goh but neither was I stuck in the stick figure mode. Let’s go back to my primary school years.

The first revelation to others about this skill apparently happened the first time I saw the original Fantasia by Disney. After I got home I was describing to my mother what the movie was like and I decided to illustrate it with a drawing. I drew one of the last scenes where out the mountain comes out a black monster ,wings, long nails and the whole works. I did this all from memory of course it had only been a few hours since I saw the movie so it was easy.

There is a gap there, all of a sudden I was one of the two assigned to draw maps and illustrations in our class up to the fifth grade. When I came to the states in 1969 (February 9, 1969 at around 8:00 or 9:00 P.M. to be exact), I was immersed in the English language and placed in regular classes (took ESL for summer vacation). The drawings kept going. I did a mural for my 6th grade class and from what I remember the teachers especially where quite impressed. It’s funny because perspective and depth came naturally to me and so the mural looked pretty realistic. Not bad for not having taken any formal drawing classes at the time. Of course my mother’s main concern was that we pick up the language. So even though teaches recommended taking art courses the following summer, English was the thing to go after.

After that my drawing skill lay dormant (occasionally I would draw something here and there all to satisfy myself). One of my younger sisters could out due me any time of the day. She actually took painting classes and was quite good at it. In 1975 I got married. We rented a camera and that was when the Genie came out the bottle. I ended up buying the camera (a fully manual Minolta with a 50mm lens at 1.8). That was just absolutely fabulous. I began taking pictures of everything in site. I now could write and draw with light! Photography (from Greek: phos [light])+ grapho [write]).

To be continued...