This was one of the first photos I took of an attractive young woman that wasn't part of a photojournalism assignment. It's an important photograph, because it was perhaps the first time I realized the power of the camera.

My first published photo ran on February 18, 1971 in the high school newspaper. Over the next year I'd stepped up to handle PR photography for the school, so my work was in pretty much every weekly paper in the Chicago north suburbs every week. I'd had images run in the big three already: The Tribune, Sun-Times, and Daily News. It was a job, and often a busy one. Most Monday mornings I'd drop 45 to 90 prints on my editors desk, nine copies of the selected image for each assignment.

I'd gotten to know most of the cheerleaders and pom-pon girls fairly well by this time, I'd learned that if I shot part of a roll of them at halftime when I had not much else going on, they'd buy prints of themselves. Monday I'd bring proof sheets to the cafeteria and quickly be mobbed by attractive young ladies.

In late spring 1972 this inevitably jumped up a level. I don't remember exactly how if happened, except that they approached me and asked to do photos. The first one was Robin, on May 18th. Pretty blond, not very expressive, a year older than me. I hadn't learned to handle backgrounds yet in this kind of work. Lots of distractions back there. In spite of that she liked the images. She had plans I didn't know about yet, after graduation a month or so later she got hired as a Playboy bunny in Lake Geneva.

The following week, on May 22nd, I did a set of photos with Sandi and Randi, both cheerleaders. That's Sandi in the image above. Those branches in the background could have been thrown more out of focus, but the backlighting worked better than the previous set. 

Sandi was easily the most popular girl in school that year. Homecoming queen, cheerleader, from a well known Park Ridge family, everyone knew her. She wanted photos, so after school we piled in her yellow 1967 Chevelle and drove to a park off Dee Road, people in other cars honking and waving all the way across town. We found relative calm in the park, and I got a handful of OK images on the one roll shot that day. 

I learned a few things that day. One was to pay more attention to the background, although I'd probably learned that in the aftermath of the shoot the prior week. Second was that the most popular girl in school was actually very nice and very easy to get along with, once one got through the hundreds of others vying for her attention. Third was that being a sort of competent photographer was one very good way to get her attention. She was a year ahead of me, and moved in different circles. If I hadn't taken those photos of her at games, if she hadn't bought some of them, I might never have met her.

June 1 was the first of three sets of photos with Rosanne, a pom-pon girl a year younger than me. This was a more organized sequence. The first few models had been for fun, this time I was getting paid by stage-mom. The first couple of shoots were to practice and get better acquainted. One was in a local park, the second was a day trip to Indiana Dunes. The third shoot was for real, composite photos to take to the Michigan Avenue agencies. We used her large white living room and I bounced a flash off the ceiling for a high-key look. My luck held, they were excellent images (by this time, a year and a half into high-volume pro photography, I'd had plenty of practice and was technically not bad on a good day, but still a little inconsistent at times. I hadn't made and learned from every possible mistake yet). A few large prints, stage-mom had the comps printed, and they headed for Michigan Avenue. They were hoping for some occasional work. Rosanne was signed exclusively by the first agency they walked into, and I saw her in Marshall Field's print ads for the next several years.

Ironically, the successes came from this first batch of models. I had plenty of models to work with for years after, and made a fair amount of money in the process, and it was way more fun than photographing high school football or basketball games. But few of these ever went anywhere with it, and none scored big the way Rosanne had until much later.

These thoughts came from scanning some old negatives yesterday and today, and on a whim after the main project was done I went back to the box of really old negatives that recently resurfaced. I have pretty much all of my negatives from December 1971 to present, and they're all organized and labeled... I know all the dates above because they're written on the envelopes/sheet protectors. Only the ones from the first less than a year of photojournalism work are missing. One thing about film, it's fairly easy to find things. I went through about 4,000 negatives in four binders from 2007 for what started this current effort, to find about 20 images and it took only a few hours to locate and scan. Not that simple with digital, and some of the earliest digital work is backed up on CD's that I can no longer read without going out and buying a CD reader. How long do CD's hold data, anyway? I guess one of these days we'll find out. The later backup drives are better, only one has failed so far to remind why redundant back-up is a really good idea.