Developing Ability

ONE OF MY FIRST photos. Note the cunning composition of power line and (just-built) fence, and the casualness of the subjects. Man, I was good.

It's a shot of my father and sister, taken in the summer of 1964. I was eight. I used my dad's camera, which was a Kodak Duraflex II that used medium-format 620 film. Then he helped me develop the negative and make prints. I'm amazed the negative survived all these years, to the point where I'm able to scan it directly into a computer -- a gadget the eight-year-old me would have found unbelievable and therefore entirely acceptible, which is one of the wonderful things about that age.

Ridgefield, Conn., 1964 | Photo by Byron (not yet B. A.) Nilsson