ChasM
Hiya! I’ve been a clicker of these pages since, as Tim F recently put it, the proprietor was a disgruntled warblogger emerging from the dark shadows of the right. I don’t comment or make myself known much, but we rescued our little one-eyed Sanders in NYC thru this Shabeen (Calendar: July), and I read and love y’all, so here we go.
In 1980 I signed up for high-school photography class, borrowed $200 from an aunt (my first loan! a lesson in capitalism!), and purchased my first big-boy camera: a Canon AE-1 kit with a 50mm lens. It was between that and a Pentax that had a nifty leaf shutter, but felt too small for my hands. This turned out to be ironic in the bad way as the ergonomics of that fucking thing haunted me for 20 years until I got a Nikon. You see, it was an aperture priority camera and they put the aperture ring on the top right in exactly the place I rest my forefinger when I’m carrying the camera (I don’t like neckstraps, and in the days before hand straps, I would wrap a thin leather strap tightly around my hand so that I could use a loose grip as I carry at my side). There is no more heart-sinking feeling as a photographer than pushing the shutter expecting f4.5 and the corresponding quick tick-tick of 125th of a second and hearing instead “Click” … … … “Click” meaning you just lost the shot because you accidentally set the f-stop to 22 while advancing the last frame because the designers felt it important to locate that dial and the optimum finger-leverage spot in exactly the same place. One can page thru my pre-2000 contact sheets and see the dark and overexposed images and go, “yep, I remember that shot I didn’t get. Fuck that camera.”
Anywho. These are photos from the first roll that I have the negatives and thus scans of, my fifth roll overall. The first four rolls were used in class assignments, and all I have from them are some bad, faded prints that I turned in for grades.
Rustic Canyon is a magical garden for children. There are countless hidden routes and secret places that only the those who grow up there know. The creek which runs thru the center was the thoroughfare of fantasies for the kids of the canyon. These shots were taken in the uppermost parts of Rustic, north of the Sunset Tunnel, past the last houses of the horse-and-stable crowd, above the twisty rock section and the formidable waterfall that was no obstacle to the children of the canyon because they had been shown the way by the older ones. Now, these places are overrun with joggers and hikers from the nearby homes and beyond, but back then, only the scouts visiting Camp Josepho and us, the explorer kids from the lower canyon, treaded thru these forgotten places.
On The Road – ChasM – Beginning at the Beginning – Rustic Canyon 1980Post + Comments (22)