Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus and the Photography Drill Sergeant.

When I was in high school, I took all four years of photography. Because it was over 20 years ago, and digital was upcoming and expensive, we were taught on 35mm film. We all were allowed to rent out Canon Rebel cameras, or the infamous Canon AE-1 manual camera. We learned everything from loading the film into the canisters, loading them on the reels for development, into the darkroom for printing and minor Photoshop techniques. My last year of photography class, I was one of the few who were first for the newly created Photography IV. For this class, we had one objective and that was to create a portfolio of everything we learned in the previous years.

The Photography courses were directed by one man and we'll call him Mr. H. Imagine a man who had so many tales of growing up in Texas, dealing with life's obstacles, and pushing forward, all centered around photography. He was most likely a Drill Sergeant in his previous life. Our assignments in this class, other than shooting photos, consisted of writing reports about photographers, shooting events around the school such as football, basketball, baseball and award ceremonies.

Although he was very strict and extremely critical, he did teach us a lot. He, most certainly, pushed us as far as we could go as photographers. One of our assignments was turning in a photo a week. That went from, taking the photo, developing, printing, and sometimes, matting the image and turning it in for a grade.

Not sure whatever happened to old Mr H. but whenever I have a camera in my hand, I feel like the ghost of Mr. H. is watching my every single move. Aperture, shutter, ISO, parallax, reciprocity.