Greatest Hits!

 My currently limited mobility has put a crimp in my photographic style.  Rather than just run film through a camera to no good end, I thought I would try something different for a while.  My software and my skills have seen a little improvement over the years, so I thought I might rescan some stuff from years past as a check on my progress.  I also have a lot of small deckle-edge prints from the pre-digital age which I'm going to scan for the first time.  To start off, here are a few thoughts on my most productive camera of all time.

A Pentax Spotmatic was the only camera in our house for about twenty-five years.  That's it in the upper left of the photo along with a later model and some lenses which came along a quarter century down the road.  For all that time I only used the lens that came with the camera when we bought it slightly used in 1970; it was an amber coated Super-Takumar 1.8/55.

At the time we bought the camera I was still playing with the idea of being a free-lance photojournalist.  I bought a radio scanner which I installed in my '49 Studebaker pickup and chased fire engines around San Francisco.  I managed to sell a few pictures to the Chronicle and the Examiner and pedaled a few to the wire services as well.  One of those of the car squeezed between two trollies on Church Street ended up on the back page of Life and a couple other photo magazines.  

None of that provided much of a living, however, so I eventually came to my senses and got a job as a social service caseworker for the City's welfare department.

One of my city job assignments was working a late shift at the San Francisco General ER.  That gave me some time during the day to get out to San Bruno Mountain to take pictures of the hawks and owls and to exercise my Saluki's.  I also got interested in falconry, and first trained a Kestrel and later a Red Tailed Hawk for hunting jackrabbits.

Gemma and her pup, Xenophon

A baby in the nest high up in a eucalyptus.

My first Red Tail

I had good times hanging out in photography blinds on the mountain south of town.  Our two daughters came along.  My best coursing dog was hit and killed by a car.  I was getting older and hadn't done a lot of things I thought were important.  So, we loaded everybody and the Pentax in a Ford Econoline van and took off for rural Idaho. (To be continued...)