I've been taking pictures almost as long as I've been alive. I got my Photography merit badge in the Boy Scouts: I was shooting pictures of our bus trips to Washington, DC and New England. I can still remember being asked the definition of "F-stop" when getting the badge signed off. (The definition of "F-stop" is: the distance from the lens to the film surface expressed in units of the lens iris diameter. The larger the F-Stop, the smaller the depth of field. )

At first I used a little Kodak cartridge camera: no film winding necessary. But after my brother came back from his tour in 'Nam, he loaned me his Minolta SRT-101 SLR camera, then later made it official by giving it to me. It was and continues to be a great still camera, even though digital cameras are becoming more popular.

When I moved on to high school, I was still taking pictures, still just for my own enjoyment, primarily at basketball games. (I was a member of the unofficial "boy's cheering section" that sat next to the official girl's section, which meant I attended every home game and several away games.) That all changed one day when I showed one of my classmates a picture I took at a previous game, where the game had to be delayed because one of the players lost his contact lens on the floor and everyone was leaning over looking for it. (This was back in the days of the hard contact lenses.) She liked it so much that she used it in the yearbook: she was the editor for the newspaper and yearbook. From then on, for the last few months of my junior year and all through my senior year, I was an official school photographer. A lot of my pictures made it into the yearbook.

I kept taking pictures ever since, even though I went back to doing them strictly for my own enjoyment, primarily at conventions and when I travelled. And, when I was working, I travelled a lot. Just in the US, I've been to Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Columbus, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta, just to name the big cities. I haven't neglected foreign travel: I've also visited Canada (Ontario), Great Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and, most recently, Japan. And everywhere I went, I took my camera.

Copyright © 2009 Alpha Video Production / Terry O'Brien
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