Where are all the photos?

You might notice a lack of photos from my childhood and school days. It's a bit of a sad story.

I don't think many photos were taken when I was at primary school - no class photos, no family snaps. There were some taken by a professional photographer from Adelaide called John Sprod. There are two books of Graham, Peter and Roger photos, one when Roger was a baby (which I have), the other when he would have been two.

When I went away to school at Geelong Grammar I had a Box Brownie camera and took quite a few black and white photos, especially during the Timbertop year. However they were all destroyed a few years later at Muthawandery, when termites got into the bedside cupboard where they were kept (I was rarely there, by this time I was at Melbourne University). 

So that's why.

It was 1971 before I got another camera. As a post-graduate student I went to a conference in England to present a paper. I travelled via Hong Kong where I bought a Minolta Hi-Matic 7s, which I still have. It's a 35mm range-finder. I didn't have much idea what I was doing, as the store put a film in and I assumed it was 36 frames. I just kept shooting and winding on until the counter got to 36, when I decided the film was finished. But it was a 20 frame film, and I had torn the film sprocket holes in my winding efforts! And I was by now in Rome, so no chance of repeating any shots from Hong Kong. Photos from those days are exclusively slides. They have been scanned, and the files sit in my Lightroom catalogue and in my Backblaze backups out there in the cloud somewhere. There are also many scanned slides from Europe and UK, taken with that camera.

I think it was 1977 when I bought the Olympus OM1, the excuse for an SLR being the imminent arrival of our first child. Certainly it was in Chester. It was a hard choice between that and the Canon AE1.