I have been interested in photography from a young age.  When I was in the 6^th grade I went to summer band camp in Wisconsin and had a bout of homesickness.  My roommate felt bad that I was so down and said how would you like to learn how to develop your own photos.  From home he had brought a homemade kit that we could use in the room.  That week I learned how to develop B&W film from my Brownie Hawkeye camera.

 I had a job at a local drugstore that had a photo department.  Near Christmas that year we got in a film developing kit that included a daylight developing tank, storage bottles, trays, tongs, measuring cup, and a contact printer.  That started my lifelong interest in photography.

In graduate school, a fellow student introduces me to pinhole photography.  He had based his graduate thesis on the history of photography and the development of pinhole cameras.  He gave me plans showing how to make a simple camera using a Quaker Oats container.  When I built my first pinhole camera I didn’t have an Oat container at school so I used a toilet paper roll tube that I covered one end with corrugated card board and a simple cardboard cap.  Aluminum foil was used to create a pinhole aperture and used black electrical tape.   I used a small 2” X 3.5” piece of enlarging paper as my film. When I had successfully captured my first image in that little camera, from that day on I was hooked. 

This was in 1977 and very little information was printed except a few articles in Photography magazines.  I immediately saw this as a way to teach photography to my high school students which was intriguing and best of all pretty inexpensive.  From that day began me and my student’s adventure of capturing those magical pinhole images. 

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