Dan's Cameras Part Seven - The Army Years and Beyond
It’s strange how life progresses and you wind up in places and situations you never imagined. By late 1987 I was in the Army. After basic training I wound up in Monterey, California at the Defense Language Institute. Actually, I was at one of the photo Meccas of the world with Carmel, Big Sur and the sacred holy ground of Point Lobos just down the road from where I spent a year learning Russian.For the first half of that year though, I was stuck to walking distance. Not bad really when walking distance included the coastland of Pacific Grove and Monterey (I was in the army, in shape and walking 7 - 10 miles in a day was not an issue!). Not trusting my gear to the US postal system, I wound up buying a very cheap Yashica Mat twin lens reflex (I know, it was square format and I couldn’t develop the film, but . . .).
Yashica Mat
The reality was that the camera was a poor imitation of my Rolleiflex but it was a camera. A serious camera. I had my luna pro light meter sent out to me and it was an excuse for me to go out photographing on weekends instead of just walking around. I never really shot much with it, fortunately, but it kept me thinking of photography. I say fortunately because, once I did get around to developing the film I shot, I suspect it had a bad shutter (or aperture) and most of the images were grossly overexposed. No problem, I really got it just to have the pleasure of shooting.
Real work came when Tina and the guys moved out later that year. I had a vehicle and, most of all, my 4x5 gear. I started to seriously shoot again, whenever possible, especially to take advantage of my time in that great location. As usual, it was a good excuse to take everyone out to a hike at a photographically convenient location!
Without going into a lot of details, I hauled my 4x5 with me whenever I could in the Army. On my run from Monterey to Goodfellow Air Force Base I photographed in Death Valley and White Sands New Mexico (following a snow storm nonetheless), while at Ft Devens, Massachusetts I photographed Vermont, and while serving in Fort Hood, Texas I took advantage of language refresher courses in Utah to photograph at the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park. And always I photographed around the bases where I was posted. I often went 6 or more months between photographing images and developing film, often developing film in a darkened closet, and doing no printing. But the urge to photograph was constant and the opportunity to photograph in such beautiful places, well, I couldn’t pass up.
Sinar F
Many of my best images came from those years.
When I got out of the army and had a hard time finding a job, photography saved me, with me eventually returning to doing freelance photography work down in Blacksburg. That gave me access to a darkroom and the opportunity to make contact prints of my negatives as well as some nice prints. It also allowed me to increasingly go into the woods to photograph. But the commercial and architectural work wasn’t enough to keep me going so I had to look for alternatives.
Eventually I moved onto grad school in Oregon where again, photography got me a graduate teaching fellowship. Best part of that was not the minimal pay, but that it also offset one quarter’s tuition from grad school and one semester’s tuition of law school (I did the fellowship for two summers in a row)! Given that the GTF required me to get out into the national forests of the NW, I got to do a lot of hiking and camping (as well as photographing). However, being a poor starving grad student doesn’t leave much money for film and processing so I increasingly went hiking without my gear. A year fellowship in DC during law school let me get out shooting with Len a few times and I brought my cameras to Zimbabwe. And upon returning to Oregon I took my 35mm gear with me on a solo backpacking trip along the wild and scenic Rogue River following my final law school exam.
But to be honest, my need to photograph had waned by then. And when I did shoot, I was not satisfied with the images. It was no longer a tool to learn about the world, the world of nature in particular. By the end of those school years, getting out for hikes and camping trips was the main goal, not making images.
I was starting a period of transition where I did not feel the urge to photograph. So I didn’t.