When I was a little kid, my folks gave me a Kodak Instamatic camera, and I was immediately enthralled about taking pictures from everywhere we went on vacations.  I guess that was my way of documenting and keeping those memories. We also had a small cabin in the mountains of southern New Mexico, so I was busy photographing and exploring that area too. But that was just the beginning.

When my daughter was born back in 1979, I realized that I needed to temporarily put college aside and make more money to support our new family.  After much begging, pleading and giving my new prospective employer a hard luck story, I got hired by a University of Utah biomedical research facility to work in their graphics department.

In high school I took a lot of drafting in addition to the math and science as I had wanted to be an architect since junior high.  Why I am not an architect is an even longer story for another day – and maybe over a beer or glass of wine.  But the point is that drafting knowledge landed my a good job when I really needed one.

My employer was primarily funded by government grant monies, and one of our jobs in the graphic department was to put together presentations that our principals would use to hopefully secure funding for our biomedical research.

Thus, my graphics skills came in handy with drawings and blueprints and laying out type for slides.  Back in the day there was no PowerPoint, so slide presentations were done by physically producing type and then laying that out on paper.  The drawings and photographs were also done on paper.  (These were typically done on 8-1/2” x 11” thick pure white paper.)  Almost everything was started in simple black and white unless we needed color photos.

My boss, Steve, did nearly all of the photography early on.  As we were a biomedical test lab, many of the photographs were of experimental medical procedures that involved a fair amount of blood and guts.  (I learned early on that I should not be a doctor – I passed out a couple of times helping Steve with some surgery shots.)

However, to produce these slide presentations we would photograph our layouts in a copy stand under really bright halogen lights using special super high contrast black and white film.  After developing the film, we would then use a blueprint type process to make our black and white images into colored slides – like maybe white type on a blue background. The idea was to get something that would look sharp and professional when shown through a slide projector. The color film from the surgery processes would be developed and then we turned that into color slides for parts of the presentation.

So, early on in my biomedical graphics career I learned about the fine points of film and slide processing.  And of course, I had to learn the details of exposure and image layout.  This got me really interested in how to take and process my own pictures.  Steve had been teaching me about the fine points of the technical side of photography from day one; that was fun! I really loved that job.

I bought a Vivitar SLR camera with a zoom lens and began to take pictures again.  I started photographing my car, then other subjects.  Pretty soon I was taking portraits of my wife and her friends and doing some landscape photography with a “real” camera. By now I had learned to process black and white film and make prints.  And after not too long, Steve had taught me how to process E-6 slide film and mount slides.  E-6 was Kodak’s Ektachrome slide film formula that also worked with Fujichrome.  All I had to do was buy my own film and/or paper.

Now this was really awesome, and I started to take more and more pictures.  When I went back to school, I quit my job at the lab, and ended up building a small darkroom in the basement of the place where I was living in college.  My Dad had given me a nice Nikon FE for my birthday one year, and then I got even more serious.

I got so into photography that I wanted to bag the business degree and become professional photographer, but my depression era parents talked me into staying in business to have a “real job”.  (At the time I thought they were really being buzz killers, but that advice proved to be quite sound. Yeah, Mom and Dad! They were much wiser than the 20 year-old me.) However, I actually have more hours of photography than I do hours in my major – marketing.  Yep, I was serious!

Well, these days as you know, I am still doing photography as a hobby, a very serious hobby.  And of course, I have my own blog – www.timothyharlow.com.  I still have that old Nikon FE with all of the original lenses that I had bought back in the day.  The Nikon FE doesn’t work anymore, but it’s a cool keepsake. And thanks to smart parents, I have a great job that gives me money to buy lots of wonderful photography gear.

So, now you know how I got the photography bug. I hope you have enjoyed learning about my early photography history. It was fun telling the story. And if any of you are into copying your old slides, I would love to know what you are using and your techniques.

Thanks a bunch for taking time to visit my blog. Have fun out there and stay safe in this crazy new year.