yophotoman's diy projects

When I was born, mid 1940's, my Father was a professional photographer, traveling from school to school, photographing ball teams, clubs and other activities for their year books and hallways. Mom was the lab tech, processing all those cut film negatives and making contact prints. She couldn't keep up with the work and care for a newborn so that ended Dad's photographer career. I've seen his work adorning the hallway walls of abandonded old school buildings in north west Ohio. When he left the photographic business, he kept his speed graphic field camera and studio cameras. Due to his love of cameras and photography, he saw to it that I had a camera available to me since I could walk. I learned photography before I was tall enough to see over his big wooden tripod. When Dad passed away, I inherited his cameras. I passed them along to other budding photographers, interested in the lore.

While in the Army, I bought several pocket cameras and then a 35 mm Pentax SLR while I attended Bible School. There I joined the camera club and served two years as photo editor of the year book. Cameras and me were a mainstay. When my Father passed away, I honored his memory by buying my first digital SLR, a Nikon D-40, with a bit of money he left me. I still have it and it remains my go-to camera for stills. I think he would be pleased.

I once had an advertising business, based on 8x10 photographs of beach resorts mounted to a display with a phone dialer to directly call the front desk, by dialing a single digit number on the picture. That ran for three years until local politics and jealousy of my success pressured the office managers of my display locations to dismantal them. They thought it was unfair competition against their pictures mounted on the walls of the tourist information centers where my displays were sitting - which they paid a fee to have there.

When pocket video cameras were all the rage, I bought several of them, Flip camera and two Kodaks. I used a Kodak Zi-8 to record an online basic Biblical Greek seminar. The only guy who finished it is a friend on Facebook. After three years online, and no one else took the seminar, I pulled the plug and dedicated the website to something else. I still have the Kodaks used them until Youtube went full 1080 HD, Then the pocket 720p cameras became outdated. My newer cameras are a Drift Ghost-S, a Canon Vixia HF-800 and a Chinese GoPro clone. These are are a bit outdated now but still fully functional for my purposes. Video below demonstrates my basic compliment of video cameras I used when I filmed from my DIY rowboat, a whitehall design. In addition to these cameras, I also use an Azden wireless microphone and sometimes my iPhone XR.