Lugnuts and Lenses
It all began with a little girl and her daddy. They were riding down the road, talking about regular stuff when all of a sudden, out of no where, comes this big red truck flying around them on the way home. The daddy looks over at his little girl and says “hold on”! As a child, you believe your daddy is the best. Well, mine was. He dropped that truck into fourth gear and put that accelerator to the floor. Off we went! That old 427 roared to life. Down the highway we went. He caught that red truck and around him we went. We left that red truck in the dust. That is what started my love affair with speed!
Fast forward a few years. My oldest sister got into photography. Back in those days we had film cameras and we had to wait, sometimes days at a time to see if we had captured the shot we wanted. I fell in love again. This time it was with the capture of a moment in time. The ability to focus on a subject and to highlight what I wanted how I wanted. Oh man did the world look different through that lens! I started out with the point and shoot that my mom had. I had literally thousands of photographs of everything that you can possibly imagine. Everything on the farm. The first purchase that I ever made with my very first paycheck was a Pentax K1000 film camera. Very basic and very simple but oh so fun. I still have it to this day. One day, film will make a comeback…..
Meanwhile I pursued my other passion. I spent the better part of my high school career in vocational school taking auto mechanics with Henry Rice. Two full years at 3 hours a day and I loved every minute of it. The roar of the engines, the smell of the oil and the grease and yes! The smell of the gas fumes! The absolute best time I can recall of high school. If you couldn’t turn a wrench that automatically ruled you out of the dating pool. The bad boys with the bad cars were what turned my head. Enough about that, you get the point.
The years went by, and life started to get away from me. I got busy and shot less. life sped up. I layed my Pentax down. I never forgot the love I had for shooting, but I was just too busy, and film had gotten so expensive, and it was starting to get hard to find. I have never been very computer savvy but one day a girl I worked with was showing off some of her photos. I asked her about them, and she said that she had recently gotten a brand-new digital camera. Digital Camera? What in the world was that? I was intrigued and very curious. She told me that it was 6 whole megapixels. Mega what? For crying out loud, what was that? The more she talked, the more intrigued I became. This sounded good and a whole lot less expensive on the finished end of things. No more film to develop and no more waiting to see if you got the perfect shot. I was in! The photographer in me was back and ready to shoot. Next time, Hawaii and wow that is some great shooting.
