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Years ago when ambition wanted to carry me from being reporter-photographer on a weekly newspaper to the higher echelon of a daily, I answered an ad in Editor and Publisher, the newspaper trade magazine. The daily in Chillicothe, Ohio, wanted a reporter. I asked the publisher if he would give me a reference letter. He wrote Pete is “a good writer and an excellent photographer.” That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. Since I was in the fifth grade writing “horror” stories my teacher read to the class, my ambition was no less than to earn the Noble Prize for Literature. Cameras were a sideline. My father was a plumber and well liked. People were always giving him odd things they no longer needed. He brought home some photography supplies one day. Packets of powder from the Eastman Chemical Company in Rochester, New York. A kerosene dark room light with its red filter. Trays. A daylight, rectangular shaped enlarger where you put the negative at the top and the photographic paper in the bottom. There was a bottle labeled ascetic acid. My curiosity tempted me to see what it smelled like. I thought someone had hit me in the back of the head with a baseball bat. Our farmhouse had a cabin at the rear, a remnant of the days when cooking was done there to escape the danger of fires. I put a sign out front advertising “Pete’s Photo Shop.” I graduated from an old box Kodak to a stylish Kodak Duaflex. With it, I earned my first dollar as a “professional photographer,” taking pictures of my high school graduating classmates charging $1 each for an eight by ten. Most of my newspaper work was with small weeklies where a reporter carried a camera as well. The four by five Speed Graphic film was expensive at ten cents a sheet. Every shot had to count. It’s hard to say what it takes to make a good photographer and a good photograph. Of course, it used to require knowledge of the equipment. Those were the days without built-in light meters and self adjusting diaphragms or auto focusing. A photographer had to judge his own light and range to the subject. The glamour of being a photographer and the mystique is gone. Anyone can pickup a digital camera aim it in the general direction of the subject and come up with a picture. Even amateurs first time out come up with some good shots. Often I laughed when someone said, “That camera takes good pictures.” To me it was like saying that typewriter writes great novels or that brush paints beaufitul portraits. Maybe I ought to quit laughing. The new camera does everything—almost. There is something a good photographer has. It goes beyond experience and training with the equipment. There is some kind of six sense, an instinct a good photographer has. If a shutter speed is set at 1/125 of a second or the flash is popping at 1/1000 of a second, there is no window of error to get the right shot. Beyond the talent of a photographer, there is an extra something. It never ceases to amaze me that the camera sees and records forever things we often don’t observe or even realize is there. A picture of someone you have known all your life may have may show you a smile, frown or twinkle in the eye you never saw before. When people complain about an unflattering photo and blame the camera, I remember the camera only takes what it sees. But it does see surprising things. Some people attractive in person come out unattractive in a photo. Ad vice versa. Our lives are recorded by the sights and sounds we witness with our senses, like a moving picture in constant motion. It never stops and we never see the same scene again. A camera captures that moment and it stays with us forever. Some are good to remember. Some are not. No one will ever forget the Matthew Brady Civil War photos of American killed by Americans and stretched out side by side waiting to be buried in an open ditch. The Nazi death camps. The naked child running down the street in Vietnam fleeing a bomb blast. I have never taken a picture I was completely satisfied with. Come close a few times though. On the wall of my office I have a photo I shot of Don Sundquist with Santa Clause. One of Kim Harpe at a Veterans Day service with her baby daughter in her arms. Dalton Roberts with his guitar putting his soul into a song. One is of Zach Wamp beaming as he tenderly takes Edith Whitman’s hand at the National Cemetery. My computer is filled with photos, some I enjoy looking at again. I have boxes and boxes of photos and negatives. There’s smiling Bill Bennett his hands in frozen motion to emphasize a point. Carl Levi sitting at a table with a ceramic Republican elephant. Sunset at VFW 4848 with the flags waving in the breeze. Sundown over the Tennessee River. The camera is like a third eye, one that sees what we miss with the other two. A friend said I ought to come up with a coffee table book of photos. I told him my historical novel Valley of the Mules collected dust after I worked on it 12 years. I don’t feel like knocking on doors again for a publisher. Maybe I’ll come up with a photo album and publish it free on the Internet as I did Valley. Maybe someone will enjoy it. I’ll just call it The Third Eye.
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