Photography thoughts after taking a photo recently of shadows cast by exterior metal stairs: I'm a stickler for shadows.  Always have been ever since I got my first camera in my teens for Christmas.  It was a Polaroid Land camera.  Via a Google search, I found a photo of a Polaroid Land model 100 camera.  I don't know if that was the exact one I had but it sure looks like what I remember - bellows and all - and the era is right - early 60's.  The camera was expensive enough (or, rather, we were poor enough) that I paid for part of it with my allowance and Daddy paid the rest and bought it for me as a Christmas present.  Not sure, but it could have been the Christmas of my 15th year, after our Mom had died at age 39, three days before the previous Christmas. 

Didn't tell my father that part of the reason I wanted a Polaroid camera was to take photos of my face to instantly study what I looked like in pictures as opposed to looking in a mirror.  I felt like this would more objectively portray what I really looked like.  Being an overweight teenager and having mild acne didn't exactly bolster my self esteem but the pictures made me look worse than in real life because when I held the camera right-up-close to my face and didn't smile, it looked more like a mug shot.  Maybe I took the photos when I was home watching my younger brothers and sisters on the nights Daddy worked late?  Maybe I took the photos while Daddy was in the hospital dying of cancer?  I don't know for sure because I destroyed those photos!

I didn't only use a camera for self-portraits. I branched out to shooting "artsy" black and white photos of my brothers and sisters.  Maybe this was a different camera - an Instamatic?  I'd have to do some digging in my photo albums to figure this out.  Looking at old photos of my family makes me sad, though.  

Whatever camera I used and when, two of my photos even got into Ingenue magazine, a teen magazine in the 60's, when I sent them off for their readers' photos feature.  One was a close-up of my younger sister who was sitting on top of our dog house with her hair hanging down.  Another was of my oldest younger sister.  I got down low and took a photo of her standing with her arms akimbo.  Looking at the photos, someone would have thought we were inner-city children but we actually lived on two acres out in the country near Canton, OH.