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Just so you know, I added a couple more pics to my last post (3/16). I try not to do that very often. Seems a bit unfair.
In my early 20's, I entered the photography phase of my life. For as long as I can recall, my father has loved taking photos. He became quite obsessed with it when I was in my teens and 20's and has been an active photographer ever since. Even in his 80's, he lugs around all this cumbersome equipment. I get tired of having to wait for him but he did teach me a lot about his art form which has no doubt played a great part in who I became as an artist, including what I do today.
Like myself, or perhaps the other way around, his subject matter is mostly nature oriented, although he does have hoards of excellent photos of friends, family and various other subjects that he has found amusing. During my childhood, he took me on many journeys throughout the western US wilderness areas. He was usually looking for wild animals - mostly very small animals such as lizards, insects, and salamanders, to either photograph or collect for his studies and classes (he taught biology for most of his life). He did his doctorate work at UC Berkeley studying Ensatina, a type of salamander out here in the west. I can't tell you how many 'slide shows' of just Ensatina I have had to endure.
In any case, I learned to appreciate all kinds of critters that we share our world with. I also learned to love the wilderness in general and all that I discovered there while on these travels. I still haven't found a way to get my color slides into the computer. If I do, I will add them here (and let you know in a later post, sorry!).
Here are a few of my black and white nature photos. I can't recall what creature made those odd nests. Some kind of insect, I imagine. The lemur was at the San diego zoo.
And here are a few photos with people in them. The photo of me (in the hat) was taken by a classmate for an assignment in portraiture. Thought I'd throw that in for yucks. I was about 22 years old. The girl with the snake is my little sister. What a good sport she was to pose with this large python named 'Boner'. Boner belonged to my roommate, a fellow biology student who had a very pronounced sense of humor.
And some color pics. An albino bullfrog and a rattlesnake - a biologist friend of my father’s collecting venom (just one of those things a field biologist’s daughter can occasionally encounter).
Here I am taking a picture of something in the desert, early 1980's:
And here's a photo of my father (early 80's, I think), looking for salamanders, and one of him peering out from under the shrubs. I think that second pic was taken in his back yard, but this is how I frequently saw him out on our trips.
I'll have to ask if he has any photos of us collecting or photographing together (I can't find any), but here's a cute one of the two of us when I was a child. It is hard to find pictures of me not making a face, especially as a child. I was a bit of a monster with an 'unusual sense of humor' as is actually written on one of my elementary school report cards.
Perhaps it's a kind of personality by-product one acquires from growing up around insects, reptiles and the like. And all the weird stuff one finds in a college biology lab - bones, skulls, brains and such in formaldehyde, real stuffed animals. I remember a stuffed two-headed calf (or fawn) in my father's lab. You have to have a sense of humor. Think Gary Larson. I worked in the biology department at College of Marin for a few years. I recall setting up a lab one day. I needed the full human skeleton - the upright kind on a stand with wheels so you can wheel them around from class to class. I finally found it in another lab at the sink, wearing a pair of dish gloves, a sponge and a plate in its clutches, and a towel over a shoulder. The perpetrator, one of my co-workers, was a good friend of my roommate, the one with the giant snake named Boner.
There's a little more info about my upbringing in my first musing.
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