My First Camera

I’ve suspected for a long time that I was born with a camera in hand. Going through old family scrapbooks has more or less proven the point. Here’s me at 6 years old holding my first camera, a Thanksgiving gift in 1946. (When I first saw this picture, I remembered this as a trick squirt gun, until Mom’s album had these “first pictures.”)

And here’s proof that I was behind the camera: a shot of my backyard pals complete with my own silhouette, a situation I try to avoid in theater photography.

And then the family, my Dad acting silly, which he rarely did, and Mom in her neat organized self. The high fence of real chain link shielded us from my grade school next door.

Here are two of my playmates, Keith and Mike, and a shot of Roddy across the street making faces at me. The other goof with this picture: it’s a double exposure of this last image. The other exposure was probably an indoor shot at home.