burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

In junior high and high school, I got really serious about photography. I got to know the guys at the local camera store, who guided me to the right stuff to store negatives. In college, I learned about not using PVC pages for slides, and not storing slides in trays unless they are glass-mounted.

In my corporate multi-image AV production days, we stored thousands and thousands of slides in binders, using polypropylene pages from several sources. We built three 2'x4' slide viewers out of 4-tube ceiling troffers mounted on plywood triangles and stuffed with GE Chroma 50 lamps and sheets of milk Plexiglas. Two had weatherstripping taped on them in rows spaced 3" apart, while one had clips to hold slide storage pages, so we could view slides with an Agfa 8X loupe. Any slides that wound up in a show were mounted in Wess glass mounts. Everything else was mounted in Pakon mounts.

We used a Bowens Illumitran IIIc for simple slide duplication. Later, we bought an inverted Beseler 4x5 enlarger color head and a Double-M Industries slide compound (X-Y movement with vernier controls, accurate to .001 inch), and set it on our copy stand. Camera was a Double-M modified Nikon F3 with pin registration back and viewfinder reticle for composition. I still have the F3... It's a conversation piece.

I look back on that now, and just smile. It was a crazy time in my life, but formative.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

Well, I was learning to be a new husband and parent + beginning teacher and finding the School of Education basically didn't even mention a huge part of the everyday job. Paperwork, handling students, discipline, school politics, the generally poor quality of many text books (and thus the need to research and give the students the correct/complete information). Photography was my hobby, I ended up teaching one year of basic photography because I was the only one on faculty who knew enough about my fairly serious hobby to handle it with help from numerous resources. And I agreed to take photography classes as night classes and during the summer break. I kept going even after being back teaching history/geography and only stopped after I not only had enough to make it a third major on my BA but one class short of a separate bachelors in Photography/Cinematography/Animation. I just plain did not have the time/resources/money to do an independent production of the length required. Besides I got shuttled sideways into taking Economics at district expense because it was becoming a new requirement for HS graduation in CA. Then I got transferred to a Jr High for 15 years and never taught Econ. By the time I got back to a Sr High Econ had become the territory of the most senior members of the social studies department because it was a 12th grade subject and those were the students everyone wanted to teach. Plus the LA District had moved 9th grade from the Jr High campus back to Sr High and those of us who transferred with them got stuck with them - none of the other teachers wanted to teach the 9th or for that matter 10th grade students so I and the other transfers got all of the 9th and 10th grade classes.
By the time I finished my 34th year teaching full time the stress was screwing with my health and my wife talked me into retiring - during those 34 years I taught so many extra classes, summer school classes etc that in 34 years I got 32 1/8 years of service credit-normally you only get 9 months service credit per school year. Without all those extra classes I would have had a bit over 25 years of service credit. That same year a women on staff retired after 41 years, all at the same school, she almost never taught any extra classes so her retirement service credit was 32 years even. That just happened to be the break point for a maximum pension - only a Masters or PhD got you a higher pension rate. I never got either because I kept switching my continuing education classes at the university to other fields when I got tired of a subject. I could have qualified for 5 majors and two more bachelors if I had ever done the paperwork and taken just two classes. I just was not interested in those two classes.