Fooling Around With Photos

Steven B. Zwickel

December, 2022

My Cub Scout pack was running a photography contest, so I took my little plastic camera out to see what I could shoot. I had taken black & white photos before, mostly of squirrels and flowers growing in the back yard. I also took my camera with me on a class trip to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens {I was apparently clever enough to write down the names of my classmates so now, some 50+ years later, I know who they were!}.

I walked two short blocks from my house without taking a picture. At the intersection I saw fire engines in front of the corner gas station, so I crossed the street (eagerly and carefully waiting for the light to turn green) to see what was going on. Some gas had spilled on the pavement and caught fire. I raised my camera and took two photos of the firefighters at work. One of these won the contest. My prize was a real camera with a flash (meaning I could now take photos indoors). I was hooked on photography.

April, 1960 Brooklyn - Fire at Texaco station

Over the years I graduated to more sophisticated cameras and my photos got a little better. Twenty years after I took the photo of the fire, I spent a week in Portugal doing nothing but taking pictures. By the end of the week, I was able to think of myself as a real photographer. I took lots of photos, some of which were pretty enough, and meaningful enough, to enlarge and hang on the wall.

A few years later I got my hands on an Apple computer. I was able to create some interesting graphics, but I never used it with photos.

Bitmap graphic made with Apple II

And then I learned to use Aldus [now Adobe] Photoshop. It was great fun altering photos and playing with the different tools. Here are some examples of things I did (when I should have been working). Most of the time, I used my own face to re-create other images.