Last year I posted about how I think that you should go back through your old shots, prints, negatives, etc.  And how you sometimes find things that jump out at you. You also find photos that can affect you in ways that you never thought that they would.

About 4 years ago, after I purchased my first DSLR (Nikon D1x), I embarked on a 366 project, I was going to take a self portrait each day for a year.  And like many 366 projects, it was a failure.  I didn’t push myself enough, and I eventually started taking shots that were uninspired and boring.  And I quit.  Going through a folder stashed away on a hard drive, I found this diptych I put together for day #39.  And it really hit something deep inside of me.  Not because it’s terribly creative, because it isn’t.

But because of what it says.

The 5×7 on the left is 16 year old me, the first self-portrait that I had ever taken back in 1993.   I was a yearbook / school newspaper / darkroom geek who spent his junior and senior years in high school taking photos of everyone else living their awesome HS lives (it’s what a HS newspaper / yearbook photographer does).  I got an assignment from my editor to take some portraits of a handful of seniors who had been nominated for some academic award or honor.  And she wanted some studio-type shots, which I never had done before.  I was somehow able to convince my photography teacher (who was quite against allowing his photography students to use the thousands of dollars of gear the school had purchased to allow photography students to learn the craft (!)   Gear like Mamiya 645s and the latest Sony Hi8 digital camcorders (with full editing decks for cutting footage), and Novatron studio lights.

He let me setup a white seamless and one Novatron flash head in a 43” (I think) white umbrella.  I didn’t have a meter.  I never had used any flash outside of a Vivtar 283 or a Sunpak 544.  I didn’t have any resources that I could use to give me pointers on how to shoot something like this.  So in the middle of class one day, I setup the light and umbrella, loaded a roll of Tmax 400 in my Olympus Om-1, put a junky 135mm lens that I had and set it up on a tripod.  I guessed the focus, and because I didn’t really know what I was doing with the lights, I guess they fired either full power or half power.  I’m pretty sure I stopped the lens all the way down to F16.  I don’t know what made me put the umbrella on a slight off axis angle from the lens, above camera right and angled down, I guess I had seen it done the last time that I had a school portrait done.  I hooked up the PC cable to my camera, set the self-timer and ran to the posing stool I had setup. 10 seconds later, the shutter tripped, and my classmates were wondering what the hell I was taking a photo of myself for.  Which was a pretty good question.  I could have asked anyone if they wanted to sit in for a test.  Still not sure on that one.  Because the darkroom was like less than 10 feet away, I didn’t have to wait for the film to be processed, I went in developed the roll, and then later that day after the film dried, I made this print.  One of the only prints that I treasure from my high school days, still have it.

Jump ahead almost 15 years exactly to the photo on the right.  I was in week 6 of my 366 project, and I had started hunting for ideas to shoot.  I came across the old print and shot this diptych.  Yet it didn’t hit me at that moment of the lapse of time, the dreams that I had at 16, that had faded and died somewhere along that path of 15 years.  Good times I had in the years that followed, as well as things that I wished I had done differently.  All that jazz.  Didn’t even cross my mind.  I shot a bland photo of me, and then a photo of the 16 year old me on my desk, and posted it to my flickr site.  It’s funny how time gives you clarity on things isn’t it?