The early days ...

My love for photography comes pretty naturally. My grandfather, Earl, always took Polaroid photos (for you youngsters look up Polaroid on wikipedia) of family events. My father, Roy, built a darkroom for us in our garage storeroom. I loved to see the Polaroid photos develop into real photographs in about 90 seconds and see photos emerge from murky chemicals in a deep sink. In our family, seeing someone with a camera in their hands was always expected. We could pose with the best of them faster than Madonna could say "Vogue".

One of my pet peeves with earlier photography was the atomic strength of the light bulbs that were inserted into the instamatic cameras. One flash of the light bulb and a person was blinded for about 5 minutes! "Mom, Dad! Where are you? I can't see ... " "Son, we're over here, walk toward the sound of our voices".

The first Christmas gift my girlfriend, now my wife, bought me was a Pentax K1000 SLR film camera. Being the joker that she can sometimes be, she first handed me a wrapped box. While I opened the box she told me that the old Polaroid camera that I was now looking at was onced owned by Elvis!!! That's great! I'm a huge Elvis fan and I was estatic about this gift. Then she laughed for a couple of minutes and told me that the old Polaroid was just that ... an old Polaroid camera. Yuk! Yuk! Yuk! I was happy either way.