My Book……………….LILAGCS (39)

Monday July 1, 2014

Part 2

Creation of Bert Burger & The Farm Progress Show

In the last Blog I spent time writing about my experiences working at Wallace's Farmer magazine and just touched on meeting Larry Black, a Agricultural Photographer. I hired Larry to shoot 35mm slides of all aspects of the Farm Show. After it was over I received a strange looking package wrapped in plain newspaper. It was setting on my desk one day when I came into my office. My partner in the office, Carol Locker, told me that Larry Black had dropped it off a few minutes ago.

I started to unwrap it and to my surprise there was a note saying “ Many people that get hired to do a special job reward the ones that hired them with a monetary gift. The note explained that Larry explained he didn’t do things like that, but in his appreciation of my hiring him he want to give me a special gift. I opened it up and guess what I saw. It was (see below) the new camera body of a Nikon FM 35mm Reflex camera:

 

35mm Nikon FM Camera body

He also went on to say that He didn’t give money, but wanted me to have the beginning of an experience using the same kind of camera he used. Larry went on to say that I could purchase lens for the camera and he suggested a 50mm lens to start with as a basic lens for all occasions (see below):

 

50 mm Nikon f 1.8 Lens

Not too long after I received the Nikon FM camera I used some money I had been saving to purchase 2 more lenses and an automatic winder See below:

 

 

135 mm Lens and a 50mm wide angle lens

automatic film winder

With all these new camera items and a new camera bag to carry them in, I was all set to learn how to take photographs (35 mm slides to start with.

I remember at the Farm Progress Show in Crawfordsville, Indiana was the show where I started my training. Larry was a different person. He would do things that the normal person didn’t do. For example, he rode to the show on his motorcycle and pulled a small motorcycle trailer behind with his equipment a tent and his food supply.

He ask me to join him on the first day and proceeded to tell me that “film was cheap” but the rest of the process was costly. For that reason he told me to not skimp on shooting photos (slides in our case). We took slides of the exhibits, and mostly people as well as the many aspects of the show. (the food tents the harvesters harvesting the grain and everything). We ended up shooting over 6,000 slides and Larry had built a 35mm slide processor to develop them. It was an assume experience. As the months went on I spent a lot of time with Larry learning the many techniques of professional photo shooting. This is the end of Part 2, I will continue with my creation of the Bert Burger character in Part 3 to come.