June 6, 2019:
These photos stop in 1970. The Beatles break up, the '60s end, and at that moment so does my interest in the Instamatic.
It's unsurprising I made no record of middle school. I was barely present, physically or mentally. Most of the time I was absent and most of the time I was high. What is there to record?
By my junior year of high school I own a 35mm SLR, a Mamiya-Sekor D-500 with an inexpensive Vivitar zoom lens and multiple interesting filters. My parental unit is enthusiastically supportive: she pays for thousands, possibly ten thousand, Ektachrome and Kodachrome images. Most are friends and events, but very many are abstracts, double-exposures, and other experiments.
These haven't survived. There's a single page of a slide album: that's all I chose to save. I had my parental unit toss the ten thousand others — literally boxes and boxes and boxes of slides. They meant nothing to me, from a period which meant nothing to me, when most of the time I was still either absent or high or both.
Now I'm sorry they're gone. I'd like to evaluate them retrospectively with grownup eyes; and I'd like some fuller documentation of whatever events there were, since so few of them are present in memory. Mostly I'd like the abstracts. I think it's possible some were interesting.
I set the camera aside through college. No money for film. The first major object I bought with employed money, hotel desk clerk money, was the Nikon F3 I still have and should use again. I love my DSLRs but that camera and its meter do a thing with light I've never seen elsewhere.