Diane

I'm starting to detect a theme here ... was this a little like ... come over to my place ... I have some etchings I'd like to show you! :-) Nice photo!

No, although we did go out a time or two, this was strictly business. I was already freelancing to all the local papers by the time I was 17 here.

I was pretty much and industrial arts major in high school and photography is one thing I regret not taking. Though ... I do remember a bit of a scandal when a couple of the guys got caught printing naked photos of their girlfriends in the lab. :-)

That's funny! I went to a small school and they didn't have a photography class or darkroom. My art teacher tried to get the school to build a darkroom, but they wouldn't do it for just one student. I was a photographer on the yearbook staff and had taken a non-credited college course on photograph when I was a junior, so I ended up getting to develop some of the pictures I took for the yearbook outside of the school. I have a similar story to yours as well.

When I was taking this non-credited course, it was at a town about 20 miles away, we used that town's local photographer's darkroom. (He was the one who taught the class.) One project had us using some of his old portrait negatives and going through them, I found a nude of the girl I sat next to in band - a real hot blonde that was a couple years older than me. If she only knew! Over the years, I wish I'd have kept that negative!

Yes ... you should have at least made a copy of it! My 7th grade shop teacher left mid-term for Vietnam via the draft. He took up photography while he was in the army and taught it when the army returned him in 1974. We had a darkroom, but I think it was originally built for burning printing plates. It got a lot of use for both photography and printing. There weren't many enlarging stations in there like there was at the university though and I think that's how the guys got caught.