Al's Old Scanned Pics

The plan here is to scan in some of my older pictures. Some will include pictures taken with my Sears Tower camera. It's still working!

Here's a picture of the old camera, vintage 1960.

The story behind this camera is this: during my last year at Berkshire Christian College I had formed a barbershop style quartet. We were going to be traveling across the US representing the college in a recruitment effort. I knew I would probably never be seeing as much of the US so I decided to take up photography. This is the original camera that I bought. Much of what I know of photography was learned then. My two mentors were Jim Loghry and Ray Stevens (just to set the record straight). I spent many hours in the darkroom developing B&W negs and printing them to paper so probably achieved the same training as I would have received in your average first year college photography course.

Many wonderful memories were to be had from my new-found hobby. Down through the years I have maintained contact with one of the members of the quartet and have just recently learned that Jim and his lovely wife, Miriam are still in the area.

So I offer a part of my life here on these pages. I'll add to them as time permits. Hope you enjoy the pictures.

My Quartet Trip in 1960

Just a word about these pictures: many of them were taken using the old Ektachrome (ASA 32) film. Over the decades they lost a lot of their quailty as the dyes began to fade. Add to that dust and actually some fingerprints (showing up as blue in color). I had a fair amount of success using Adobe Photoshop with some Applied Science Fiction plug-ins. The dust was handled quite well by a free utility put out by Polaroid called "Polaroid Dust and Scratch Remover (PolDSR)." This dust remover utility is an amazing tool -- one that I just could not do without with these old slides.



Take a look at the next 7 photos. They are remarkable in that they were taken on the same mountain -- Mt. Taylor, NM - near Grants, NM. The first three are taken on the side that gets most of the rain - the clouds literally get hung up on the side of the mountain. However, the next three are desert-like because little rain falls on that side. By the way, when I stepped off the road to take a photo of the desert side I was yelled at because I could have been bitten by a rattlesnake! Talk about an ignorant New Englander!!
			See below: I think this is a nice picture of the Polks. The young guy is Charlie the bass in our quartet. He died in a helicopter accident while in military service. The older guy was his dad. I'll get his name when I get a chance.
The next picture to the right shows the road we used to get off the mountain!!
The next two pictures were taken during our stay at Clovis, NM but I do not know who these gals were, just that they were very nice.