Photography Archives

February 9, 2012

1963 Boy Scout Pre-Camporee

It’s Scout Week, so it’s an appropriate time to dredge these up. Some of these photos are of are men and boys I recognize being in Trinity Lutheran School’s Boy Scout Troop 8. The negative sleeve said they were taken at the 1963 Pre-Camporee. I can’t quite place where the event was held. Maybe someone else can clue me in.

I recognize a few of the boys. Two who were my age were Joe Snell and Ronald Dost.

Stan Snell, Harry Ruesler , Ralph Haman

Three of the adult leaders were Stan Snell, Harry Ruesler and Ralph Haman.

Loading them up

Dad (L.V. Steinhoff), left, loads up a batch of boys into his pickup. Clarence Schade is on the right.

A double exposure

Something was wrong with this photo. A closer look disclosed that it was a double exposure: two photos taken on the same frame of film. That’s pretty tough to do with most cameras because you cock the shutter for the next photo when you advance the film. About the only only way you can do it by accident is to load the film in the camera twice. (There’s another way, but you REALLY have to want to do it.)

It dawned on me, then, that in 1963 I was still using a Kodak Pony 135 camera. I had to go searching for a manual on line to refresh my memory. As soon as I saw it, it all came flooding back.

It was designed for folks who didn’t know much about photography, but it still required you to set your shutter speed, aperture and distance. On top of that, you had to remember to cock the shutter by pushing down on a lever on the front of the lens. After you had taken the photo, you had to turn a knob on the top of the camera to advance the film. If you forgot to do that and just cocked the shutter, you could take a double exposure like this one.

Scout Executive Paul Berkbigler

I wrote about Mr. Berkbigler earlier.

Photo Gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

February 5, 2012February 5, 2012

There’s a Football Game?

I read somewhere that you can’t use the phrase Super Bowl without getting nasty letters from the folks who license it. They supposedly even tried to trademark The Big Game, so we’ll be somewhat circumspect here. We’ll call it The Big Blowout.

This picture isn’t the one I was looking for, but it’ll have to do since it has a helicopter in it. Here’s the story about why I was dangling from it.

I don’t remember what year it was, but we were unfortunate enough to have The Big Blowout played in Miami. Unfortunate because we were going to have to pull out all the stops to cover it. Miami is 1-1/2 hours away on a good day, and Big Blowout Day isn’t a good day.

This is not from The Big Blowout

To get around the problem, I chartered a helicopter like the one above to shoot some aerials of the stadium and then land to pick up film from our photographers. We were going to keep making those film pickups throughout the game to keep from getting hit with all the film at the same time.

The first problem came when we couldn’t get permission from the City of West Palm Beach to have the chopper land in our parking lot to do the film drop. “We can’t land,” I said to the pilot, “but there’s nothing to keep you from hovering so long as you get the OK from Air Traffic Control, right?”

“Right,” he nodded. I liked this guy.

So, the plan was to have the chopper come in and hover while I ran up to scoop up the film. Then, he’d boogie back to Miami for the next run. We had a tall two-way radio tower on the roof, so I carefully marked the guy wires with glow-in-the-dark tape and set up floodlights to illuminate the tower. We had the pilot do a walk-though and got his OK with the setup. He filled in the airport folks, assured them that he wasn’t going to land in the city, and we were good to go.

This one isn’t either

The day of the Big Blowout, we got a radio call from the chopper saying he was 10 minutes out. I clambered up a steel ladder, levered myself through a tiny roof hatch and waited for the film to arrive. THWACKA THWACKA THWACKA, he made the approach. Closer, closer, closer, lower, lower, lower, lower.

Just about the time he was going to hand over the film, I was almost knocked off my feet by something that was a cross between a tsunami and an earthquake. The downdraft from the rotor had started the whole roof oscillating. There was no doubt in my mind that if this went on much longer, the effect would be the same as shaking out a bed sheet. My good idea was suddenly looking like it was a bad idea. I didn’t know how much a new roof cost, but if they took it out of my salary, I was assured of having a job for a long, long time.

I gave the pilot a quick wave-off and we made all the rest of the drops when he 30-50 feet above us.

So, don’t count on me being glued to the tube tomorrow. I’ve had all the Big Blowouts that I care to experience.

February 3, 2012

Missouri Highway Patrol

I’d rather see these Missouri Highway Patrol troopers here than in my rearview mirror with their red lights spinning. The negative sleeve is dated January 5, 1967, but I didn’t see it in the paper around that date. I thought it might have been taken for the 1967 Achievement Edition and, in fact, there was a story about the Troop E in the February 21 paper. These aren’t the photos that ran with the story, though.

At some time or another, I ran into just about every trooper that worked the counties around Cape, but these guys don’t look familiar. The trooper I knew best was Norman Copeland. He should have been a recruiting poster for what a Highway Patrolman should look like.

How NOT to shoot a photo

This is not how to shoot a photo of a bunch of people. I violated the newspaper rule of thumb that a person’s head should be at least the size of a nickle in the print. The subjects are way too small.

My fashion faux pas

I should have remembered that lesson when I moved to Ohio.

The society editor at The Athens Messenger went to a lot of trouble to round up some college girls to model some clothes for a fashion shoot. I don’t like to set up pictures and my idea of fashion is blue jeans and Red Wing boots, so I probably should have handed the assignment off to Bob Rogers, the other photographer. Still, I loaded the gals into my car and we headed off to a state park where we had a great afternoon shooting all kinds of artsy stuff.

The next morning, I dropped off the prints and waited for the praise for a job well done. Marge Straight, the soc editor, looked at them and, in her usual quiet, diplomatic way, said, “Ken these are very nice, but the idea of a fashion shoot is to show the clothes.” Luckily the models were amenable to another day frolicking in the woods.

I used to tell my staff that I’d never ask them to shoot an assignment that I hadn’t shot or wouldn’t be willing to shoot. I lied. I dodged every opportunity to go to New York for the annual fashion shoots.

January 31, 2012

Civic Center 1967

Here’s another story that’s fallen into Google’s black hole. These photos of girls at South Cape’s Civic Center were taken February 22, 1967 for The Missourian’s Youth Page. Unfortunately, there’s a whole range of dates missing from the Google Archives for that period, so I can’t tell you exactly what’s going on and who the girls are.

As best as I can remember, a young lady from Southeast Missouri State College showed up to lead the girls in something. I can’t tell if it’s modern dance, stretching or, in one photo in the gallery, the proper way to carry a heavy rock.

How the photos were taken

Since I don’t have any other info, let’s talk technique.

I got a little sloppy with this photo. See the legs of my tripod light stand in the back left of the photo. This must have been when I was experimenting with “hot lights” to boost the illumination enough that I wouldn’t have to use flash.

That’s a technique that I used for most of my career. Some guys are able to visualize what the light will look like when their strobes fire. I can’t. I have to SEE the light. That’s why I used photo floods or quartz lights. My theory was that if God had wanted the world lit by flashes, he’d have made lightning the standard, not the sun.

Rube Goldberg lighting

In addition to more formal lighting, I carried some homebrew contraptions.

The photo staff made up a sets of Rube Goldberg-looking portable lights that used a peanut-sized 1000-watt light bulb that fit into a special ceramic socket with two bare wires protruding from it. We’d twist those wires onto some lamp cord, attach the sockets to a huge metal clamp with pipe clamps and be on our way. The more diligent of us would solder and tape or use heatshrink tubing on the junction. They were great because you could clamp them just about anywhere and they’d throw out a LOT of light. OSHA and the loss control department would probably frown on them for a number of very good reasons.

As much heat as light

The bad thing is that they’d also produce a lot of heat along with the light.

One election day, chief photographer Jose More and I went around to all the campaign headquarters and stuck lights up so the shooters wouldn’t have to deal with it on the run. The next day, Jose and I went back to retrieve our gear.

Oops, one of the lights had shifted, leaving a large charred mark on the drywall. Jose and I looked at it, looked at each other, nodded, then slapped a huge campaign poster over the damage and bolted. Thank goodness this was still back in the day of smoke-filled rooms. Nobody noticed that the place was nearly on fire.

Civic Center Photo Gallery

If you recognize anyone, call ’em out. If you remember what was going on, please fill us in on that, too. I shot a sock hop at the Civic Center in the summer of 1967. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.