I’m trying to remember my first encounter with photography in any form other than being the subject of my parents’ all-seeing eyes. My dad enjoyed taking pictures of me as I grew up. He would shoot both slide and print film. Not unlike the experiences of many people, my childhood included a number of moments captured on film for all eternity. Some are sweet: my sister and me standing among the aspen as the leaves turned color in the fall. Some are embarrassing: naked, two years old and pudgy, collapsing a plastic swimming pool. Many are memorable in that classic sense, quiet captures of being in a certain place at a certain time. In all of this I was aware of the camera only as I was the subject.
I think the moment of realization that a mechanism to photography existed came later. The understanding that my dad had learned this method came to me when as a young boy as I looked at a picture he had taken at night in Washington D.C. I cannot recall the exact subject of the photograph– I suspect the primary subject was one of the monuments or famous buildings from the capital. I want to say it was a wide shot along side the mall with the Washington Monument off to one side. But what I remember clearly was that it contained a streetscape. Bright streaks raced along the pavement where the cars should have been. But there were no cars. There were only these streaks of light. I asked dad about the picture. He told me how he took it. I thought he was a magician. He took a picture and made all the cars disappear. Obviously the cars had gotten zapped by these streaks and now were gone!
Dad patiently explained to me how he composed the shot. He had taken a long, multi-second exposure and what I was seeing was the glow of tail lights as the cars moved through the frame. The entire lesson went right over my head at the time. What stuck with me was this idea that a photograph was an object in its own right. Up until that point I had thought that photographs were just ways to record what something else looked like: a secondary thing of no real importance. But the taillights proved otherwise. I knew the cars had been driving by when dad took the picture. But they were not in the picture. They disappeared. I knew taillights were not a hundred yards long, but they were in the picture. They went all the way down the mall to the monument.
I wanted to learn how to do this. I wanted to know how it worked. And with childish intensity I continued to pester my dad until he relented and began to reveal the secrets to me.
Dad’s 35mm Nikkormat FT was one of the first real cameras I ever used. Dad had bought it when he was in college. He took it with him everywhere. Backpacking in Colorado, canoe trips in Indiana, bicycle trips around Lake Michigan. Dad used this camera to capture the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and the top of Long’s Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park. He hauled it up to the top of Mt. Elbert and through the backwoods of the Minnesota Boundary Waters Wilderness Area. When I was fourteen, Dad gave me this camera. Although in all honesty I suspect it was a loan that I never paid back.
Under the Banner of Heaven will be the third book I have read from author Jon Krakauer. The other two books include his moving non-fiction account of the harrowing 1996 summit of Mt. Everest, 
Beta|Erinyes 