Photography and I span a lot of history

I’ve told people I could write about any subject at the drop of a hat. Apparently I can do the same thing with a Rotary program.

When the program coordinator cornered me I surrendered immediately and asked her what she wanted me to talk about. Photography was the reply.

I think she probably had in mind that I give tips on making snap shots better. I turned that idea on its nose and made it about myself. It turns out my experience with photography spans a lot of history.

You can start that history with a pocket instamatic as my first camera. I got myself a 35 mm camera in junior high and by way of my best friend I landed a gig as a yearbook photographer. More accurately, he shot the photos and I lugged the camera bag and protected him from defensive ends on the football sidelines.

Our medium back then was black and white film from Kodak called Tri-X. That’s right, I learned darkroom in high school. The hardest part was getting that film on the tank reels in total darkness. I eventually got it.

I was really bitten by the news bug during the 1978 fire in downtown Portales. Gordon King Greaves did an awesome job of capturing the day in photographs and words. I got my part in it all when he handed me, the kid in the pressroom, his film and asked me to rush it out to Eastern New Mexico University to be developed.

My first big front page photo was a cool photo of kids tubing down the spillway at Ute Lake. I shot a few more, then took a job as a sports writer and got a whole lot of really bad sports photos published. It looks like fun, but working with film in really dark gyms is really hard.

Reporters and photographers were normally expected to supply their own camera equipment in those days and I never had great stuff, but I learned how to compensate. Eventually digital appeared on the scene and an actual digital camera could set you back five figures. So no one had them. Instead we first used flatbed scanners to scan prints then later negative and slide scanners and we just used the one-hour photo and got rid of the darkroom chemicals.

The first digital camera I ever handled was when I was working as a graphic artist at the Telluride Daily Planet. The ski bum it was entrusted to didn’t have that kind of money, but one of the trust fund newspaper owners did. Eventually their price came down and we all had them.

I trained a lot of reporters to shoot and work the darkroom. I was never great, but I could get them started in the right direction. There was that one guy though.

We drive from Tucumcari to Clayton to cover a football game. He’s shooting and I’m going to keep the book. The game went well and we head back into the night for the last leg of the four hours of driving. Halfway home he begins to moan and I pull over to see what’s wrong. Seems he had just realized he never put film in the camera. Lucky for him my wife was along and wouldn’t let me leave him on the side of the road.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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