Return with us now to those colorful days of yesteryear… colorful, because everything was photographed with a magic film stock called “Kodachrome.” Yes, the very same film immortalized in the Paul Simon song.
Most of the photos in this collection were shot with a Nikon F2. State of the art at the time, and I’ve still got it in a drawer, but it’s an antique now. The photo of the lightning strike above was shot with my first “serious” 35mm camera, a Konica…. something, I don’t even remember the full designation now. It was considered very advanced because it had a built-in light meter and was capable of aperture-preferred automated exposure control.
I took that Konica with me when I moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1973. In January of ’74 I met Georja Skinner, and she introduced me to the marvels of Nikon. Later that year when my parents went to Hong Kong they brought back a Nikon F2, which was my primary camera until I got my first digital SLR in 2003 – a Nikon D100.
After living in Los Angeles for a little over a year, I started really jonesing for the colors, smells, and cool air of autumn. So Georja and I made a camper of sorts (no bed) out of a 1968 Volkswagen and headed east. We stopped in New England, New Jersey, New York, and Maryland, and then wound our way back west along a southern route through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Most of the photos in this collection are from that trip, the “Ozone City Circus Continental Crusade.” I’ll have to see if I can find the black and white photos of us in our circus outfits we made along the beach in Santa Monica before we left.
The last few photos are from the trip we made to England for 5 weeks in May of 1976. There are probably a lot more from that trip, but these are the only ones so far that I have scanned-and-Photoshopped back to life.