As a boy, my dad used to have his own darkroom and developed his own film and made his own prints and enlargements, all black and white in those days. His darkroom was the bathroom which he took over for that purpose, he blacked out the window so no light could get in and had a board over the bathtub for all the equipment, enlarger, developing dishes, chemicals… the lot. I remember being in there with him under the glow of the red lamp, the only light allowed in amateur film processing. When he finished a developing run, any old chemicals were dumped down the bathtub which turned green with that usage. Because of his hobby, we could never have a bath, we must have been a smelly bunch.

Lots of the photos of us as kids are from my dads photo developing days. If digital photography had not been invented, it is more than likely I would have tried some home processing, I always wanted to but never had the time or money in the past but would never have been allowed to use the bathtub like my dad did. My mother always went along with whatever my dad wanted to do, she must have been an angel and he never thanked her and just expected to have what ever he wanted and she faithfully did that.

I am a bit of a chip of the old block and want to do things on the cheap, lets call it economics or being frugal. I am sure all that photography equipment of my dads was either second hand or bought on a payment scheme of which he never made the payments. When all the equipment disappeared, it may have been repossessed by the photography store, I seem to remember his cameras were low end and maybe not the best, he even gave me a Brownie box camera, I have an identical model in my old camera collection.

In my camera collection, I still have my film cameras from before digital including my Pentax K1000 SLR film camera, with which I took many fine photographs. I also took many prints that would be discarded after going back to the drug store a few days later to pick up the results of a roll of film, now processed. The best photos would be sent off around the world to friends and family, leaving our photo albums with the in-between pics, not discarded and not considered good enough to be mailed off to others. I solved that problem by going over to slides and giving slide shows to the family. I always managed to get the slides in the projector the wrong way, upside down or back to front with all the usual guffaws from the family but I still have every slide that I took and hope one day to get them all digitised.

With the arrival of the digital age and memory cards that can hold thousands of pictures which can be emailed across the globe at the click of a mouse, and not the long tailed variety, I now take many more pictures than I ever did with film. A roll of 24 would last several weeks or months, even a holiday was limited to 4 or 5 rolls. Now I am disappointed if I have less than 2000 pics after a two week vacation. I always have my camera with me when out and about and always looking for that once in a lifetime photograph that might make the cover of National Geographic Magazine but, these days, happy to get one of my pictures on Oliver Daily News.

I missed a great opportunity one time with having no camera to hand and could have kicked my self. Some years ago, a flash flood near Vaseux Lake, with mud and rocks, two feet deep, washing across the highway into the lake and there I am with no camera.