One day, in my second year at University, one of my seniors in College House, my Residence, said: ‘Have you ever processed your own prints?’ No, I had always just handed them into the friendly local chemist. He took me into the Residence’s dark-room, took one of my negatives, put it into the enlarger, switched off the light, plunging us into the wonderful, comforting red glow of the safelight, focused the weird negative image, exposed a sheet of paper, and let me slide it into the apparently inert liquid. As the image grew from pale through the various stages of contrast, until the face of my set-daughter-to-be, Colleen, lay fully developed in that same liquid – now a wondrous potion!
It was indeed a Magical Epiphany; one that kept me averring that I was a Photographer for the next 25 years.
I did my first professional job with that camera, but I knew quite early on that it was not really up to the job. Those were the days when many photographers were still lugging huge 4×5 plate cameras around. The Chief Photographer of The Cape Times (where I met my wife, and for whom I began to take photographs for her various journalistic ventures) still went off to Rugby games carrying his Speed Graphic with five or six slides. He would charge up and down the touchline, focussing by guess work (and the hyper-focal distance) and come back with five or six god photos. He scorned 35mm, which most of his younger staff were using.
So, when I realised that I might actually be paid for my little fetish, I went back to stalking the streets and the second-hand shops. There I found a slightly battered Yashicaflex. I seem to remember it cost me R12. My professional career was launched!
It didn’t take long for me to realise that this piece of equipment would not cut it. A friend asked whether I would photograph her wedding. I refused. Wedding photos were all stilted and posed, and really high quality. I was not interested – I was a photo-journalist. That was exactly what she wanted she said. No posed photos, just an informal, journalistic record. It was the money that finally seduced me. It wasn’t as much as ‘proper’ wedding photographers were getting, but it WAS almost enough to buy me a Pentax Spotmatic with an amazingly fast 1.8 50mm lens! I was in!