Part 5
Graduation came and went and I was out in the real world. Working in a studio in the early 1980’s was a lot different than I was expecting, and a lot different than it is now. No Playmates running around or any of the things everyone expected, just kidding. Even without all of that I loved who I was working with and where I was, which brings up a story.
When I was young, kindergarten didn’t exist in public schools and my mother worked in Lawrenceville for the board of education. I rode to Lawrenceville to work with her everyday and I went to a private kindergarten in Grayson with one of her co-worker's daughters, LeAndra. In the afternoons I would stay with LeAndra at her house till my mother got off of work. After kindergarten I never saw her, till I walked into work on my first day after photography school and, low and behold, there she was working at the same studio. We became very good friends all over again and I miss those days when we used to talk while the film was washing.
If you remember in one of my earlier posts, I was using an RB67 camera at the time, that big heavy camera. The RB was basically made to be a studio camera and not one to be lugged around at a wedding for 5 or 6 hours on a hot Georgia Saturday. When we would finish a wedding on a Saturday, our arms would feel like they had been stretched a couple of inches! What you did at that time was add on a flash bracket that held a flash above the camera, then a heavy flash with a big battery on your shoulder and then you had the weight of the camera. Something about being a guy, 21 years old and doing this every Saturday while my friends were at the lake made things get old quick.
During the week I was working in a darkroom all day from 10 till 6 with the only breaks being to photograph babies and working every weekend photographing weddings. This wasn’t what I had pictured photography to be. Occasionally I was able to photograph senior portraits and loved that because I wasn’t much older than the seniors and we had a lot we could talk about. Bonus! -they didn’t cry or spit up. But seniors were few and far between and I was the low man on the totem pole, so a lot of time was spent in the darkroom or assembling wedding albums.
What was I going to do? Had I made the biggest mistake of my life?!