09/03/2026
When I was in my pr***en years, my father handed me an Olympus OM-1 film camera he had bought around the time I was born in 1973.
Neither one of us could have known at the time just how much that little camera would shape my life.
Over the next year or so, Dad taught me the fundamentals. Aperture. Shutter speed. Film speed. How changing one affected the others. How to meter a scene. How to focus manually. How to think about light instead of simply pointing a camera at something and pushing a button.
There was no autofocus to save me. No image stabilization. No LCD screen on the back where I could immediately look at a photograph and say, “Well, I screwed that one up.”
And there certainly wasn’t Photoshop waiting at home to rescue me.
You loaded a roll of film, made your best guess based on what you knew, took the picture and hoped like hell you had gotten it right.
For a kid growing up around our family’s remote hunting lodge in the Alaskan Arctic, however, I couldn’t have asked for a better classroom.
My subjects were everywhere.
Caribou wandered across the tundra. Moose appeared in the willows. Bears occasionally wandered a little closer than anyone would have preferred. Birds filled the wetlands and cliffs. Mountains stretched across the horizon. The Brooks Range rose in the distance, and the Sagavanirktok River twisted through a landscape that seemed impossibly huge.
I didn’t have to travel halfway around the world looking for wildlife.
I just had to walk outside.
That Olympus became my constant companion, and photography became a hobby that has consumed me for nearly forty years.
It is difficult to explain to younger photographers just how different learning photography was in the 1980s.
There was no YouTube.
There were no online tutorials.
There weren’t ten thousand photographers on social media explaining the exposure triangle while trying to sell you a Lightroom preset.
If I wanted to learn something, I had to find someone who knew it or find a book that explained it.
So I became a sponge.
I hunted down every photography book and VHS tape I could find. I worked in camera stores. I asked questions. Lots of questions. I hung around photographers whenever they were willing to tolerate some wet-behind-the-ears punk following them around.
I learned by watching people who were better than me.
Mostly, though, I learned by screwing things up.
Film was an unforgiving teacher because every mistake cost money.
You might spend an entire afternoon photographing something, send the film away for processing, and wait days or even weeks before discovering that you had underexposed half the roll or missed focus on the best shot.
But that taught discipline.
You learned to slow down.
You learned to look.
And you learned to think before pressing the shutter.
I shot with that Olympus for roughly fifteen years before I finally felt I had earned the right to buy what I considered a top-tier professional camera.
The OM-1 went into a drawer around 1998.
And there it stayed. Until recently, when I pulled it back out.
It had accumulated nearly three decades of dust, although probably not quite as much as the memories it helped create.
I turned the dials. Worked the film advance. Looked through that familiar viewfinder.
And suddenly I wasn’t standing there as a man who had spent decades photographing wildlife, landscapes and people.
I was a kid again.
I remembered using it to photograph sports for my high school newspaper. I remembered playing around in the school darkroom, watching images slowly materialize in trays of chemicals under the dim red light.
There was something almost cathartic about holding that camera again.
I’ve been thinking about putting a few rolls of film through it, partly for nostalgia and partly because I want to keep my photography skills sharp until I can once again put a professional-caliber digital camera in my hands.
But holding that Olympus also brought back the memories of why I got into photography in the first place. .
At one point my father was exploring the possibility of bringing photography tours to our hunting lodge.
It made sense.
We had the wildlife and scenery that could rival anything tourists were traveling to Denali National Park to see, except we had one significant advantage.
There were virtually no tourists.
The Dalton Highway was still closed to the general public then. The country surrounding us felt enormous, wild and wonderfully empty.
Dad reached out to Joseph Van Os, whose name would become synonymous with high-end nature photography tours. Van Os couldn’t make the trip himself because of prior commitments, but one of his guides, Perry Conway, came to scout the area.
We gave Perry the grand tour.
Dad flew him around in our planes. I drove him along the Dalton Highway. We showed him wildlife, mountains, rivers and miles upon miles of Arctic wilderness.
One evening Perry and Dad were talking when the conversation turned to a project Perry was working on involving peregrine falcons for the Colorado department of Fish and Wildlife.
He already had many photographs of adult peregrines in flight.
What he needed were photographs of nests and chicks.
Dad basically said, “Well, the kid knows where some are.”
I had discovered several nests while riding horses through the area.
I hadn’t exactly found them through careful scientific observation, either.
In several cases, the peregrines had informed me of their location by dive-bombing my head when I rode too close to their nesting cliffs.
Apparently peregrine falcons have a very effective neighborhood-watch program.
When Perry heard this, he immediately wanted to know if I could take him to one.
Absolutely.
The following morning we headed out.
Perry showed up carrying his professional Canon equipment and an enormous 500mm lens.
I showed up with my Olympus.
I looked at his equipment.
Then I looked at mine.
And somewhere inside teenage me, I experienced one of my earliest documented cases of lens envy.
His 500mm looked like something NASA might use to photograph the surface of Mars.
My Olympus suddenly looked like something you’d find inside a cereal box.
Still, I knew where the falcons were.
One particular nest was relatively accessible. It sat near the top of a cliff overlooking the Sagavanirktok River, better known to anyone familiar with Alaska’s North Slope simply as the Sag.
The nest was unusual because the birds were using what appeared to be an old fox den near the cliff edge. Instead of requiring climbing gear and a suicidal disregard for gravity, we could approach it from above and carefully climb down.
As we got close, one of the adults returned.
The bird saw us.
Then we heard the scream.
Anyone who has been close to an angry peregrine knows that sound.
It wasn’t subtle.
It was basically the avian equivalent of:
GET THE HELL AWAY FROM MY KIDS.
The falcon folded its wings and came at us.
Perry, who was also a wildlife biologist and understood how to approach the nest safely and minimize disturbance, reached into his gear and produced something I wasn’t expecting.
An umbrella.
He handed it to me.
My assignment was simple.
Open it.
Close it.
Open it.
Close it.
The movement would distract the attacking adult while he climbed down to photograph the chicks.
So there I stood on top of an Arctic cliff furiously pumping an umbrella while an enraged peregrine falcon tried to remove us from its property.
Every time it screamed toward me, I ducked instinctively.
WHOOOOSH.
Open.
Close.
WHOOOOSH.
Duck.
Open.
Close.
Photography is so glamorous sometimes.
While I was performing my best interpretation of Mary Poppins having a nervous breakdown, Perry had climbed down the cliff to the nest and got his first glimpse.
He was ecstatic.
There were two chicks.
They were still covered almost entirely in soft white down, indicating just how young they were. Perry began photographing them while I continued my highly technical duties as Assistant Umbrella Operator and Peregrine Falcon Decoy.
Then the second adult arrived.
Wonderful.
Now I had two of them trying to kill me.
After Perry had gotten his photographs, he climbed back up and asked if I wanted to go down and take a few pictures myself.
I had never seen peregrine chicks up close.
Of course I wanted to. Curiosity has been responsible for a disturbing percentage of the situations I’ve gotten myself into over the years.
I carefully climbed down toward the nest with my Olympus.
And there they were.
Two enormous white cotton balls. With talons.
At first glance, that was almost all you could see. Their bodies disappeared beneath thick, snowy down that insulated them against the cold Arctic air. But sticking out of all that softness were faces that looked like they belonged to something considerably more ancient.
One chick stared directly toward my camera with an enormous dark eye surrounded by bare bluish-gray skin. Its hooked beak was already unmistakably that of a predator, despite the ridiculous halo of white fuzz surrounding its head. It looked simultaneously fragile, curious and slightly annoyed that I had interrupted breakfast.
The second photograph captured both chicks together.
They were nestled into the rough floor of the nesting site, surrounded by tundra vegetation, bits of grass, stones and debris. One sat slightly behind the other, the two of them looking toward me with those enormous dark eyes.
They were adorable.
Mostly.
Because scattered around them were the remains of breakfast.
Ptarmigan feathers littered the nest, and traces of dried blood remained around the chicks’ beaks.
It was a perfect little Arctic family portrait.
Two fluffy cotton balls sitting among the dismembered remains of their breakfast.
Nature has a sense of humor.
I raised the Olympus and started taking pictures.
Focus.
Meter.
Compose.
Click.
Advance the film.
Focus again.
Click.
And remember, there was no checking the back of the camera afterward.
Those images existed only as possibilities trapped inside a roll of Kodachrome.
Then something hit me. And it wasn’t an idea.
WHAM.
An explosion of pain erupted across the back of my head.
For a moment I nearly lost my footing.
I grabbed onto the cliff and tried to figure out what in the hell had just happened.
Then I realized.
I had just been bitch slapped by a very pi**ed off mother.
While I was photographing the chicks, Perry had apparently become distracted by another photographic opportunity. With the adults circling against the Brooks Range and Sag River valley, he had set up that enormous lens and started photographing them in flight.
There was just one small problem.
He had stopped operating the umbrella.
One of the peregrines came screaming past him and went straight for the idiot standing next to her babies.
Me.
A peregrine’s hunting dive, or stoop, can exceed 200 miles per hour. They normally use that extraordinary speed against birds in flight.
Fortunately, Mom wasn’t traveling at anything close to full hunting speed when she hit me.
If she had been, this story might have had a considerably shorter ending.
But she hit me hard enough.
It felt like somebody had swung a baseball bat into the back of my skull.
I scrambled back to the top of the cliff rubbing my head while Perry realized what had happened and started apologizing.
Apparently I had done a much better job with the umbrella than he had.
We didn’t stay long.
Altogether, we were around the nest for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. Perry knew we needed to minimize the stress on the chicks and get the adults back to them as quickly as possible.
We packed up and left.
My head hurt.
Perry was thrilled.
And despite being assaulted by a peregrine falcon, so was I.
I had just helped an accomplished professional wildlife photographer get photographs he needed for an assignment.
Without realizing it at the time, it was also my first experience guiding another photographer in the Alaska wilderness.
It wouldn’t be my last.
Unfortunately, the larger photography-tour idea didn’t work out.
After Perry returned home, we eventually heard that the Van Os operation wasn’t interested in using our lodge.
It wasn’t the wildlife.
It wasn’t the scenery.
It was the accommodations.
Their clientele were paying $10,000 or more for some of these photography trips and were accustomed to beautiful lodges, fresh linens, comfortable rooms and probably a mint lovingly placed on their pillow every evening.
Our lodge consisted largely of repurposed buildings from the oilfield construction days.
We had beds.
We had food.
We had heat.
We had some of the most spectacular wilderness in North America right outside the door.
But nobody was folding towels into swans.
We probably could have upgraded everything to the standards they expected, but doing so would have eaten so deeply into the profits that there wasn’t much point.
So the idea died.
But the peregrine story wasn’t quite finished.
A few weeks after our season ended, Dad received a call from Perry.
The photographs we’d helped him obtain had made it into the brochure, and he wanted to thank us again.
During the conversation, Dad mentioned that I had taken some photographs of the chicks too.
Perry asked to see them.
Dad sent him a couple of my shots.
After Perry received them, he called Dad again.
He told him that he wished he had seen my photographs before submitting his own because he thought at least one of mine was better than what he had captured.
Had he seen it in time, he said, he would have submitted mine alongside his.
I couldn’t believe it.
Here I was, some teenage kid from the middle of nowhere in Alaska with an old manual-focus Olympus, being told by an accomplished professional photographer that one of my photographs might have been good enough to publish.
That planted a seed.
Maybe I could actually do this.
Maybe someday someone would publish one of my photographs.
Maybe photography could become more than something I did while wandering around the Arctic with Dad’s old camera.
Nearly forty years later, I know where that seed eventually led.
That is what came flooding back when I recently pulled the OM-1 from the drawer.
I look at these two peregrine photographs today and I know they aren’t going to compete technically with images being produced by modern professional cameras.
They have grain. They aren’t clinically sharp. The dynamic range isn’t miraculous. I couldn’t fire off twenty frames per second and pick the perfect expression afterward.
I was a teenage kid in the 1980s.
I had Kodachrome film.
I had a completely manual Olympus OM-1.
I had a few seconds with two peregrine chicks before their mother decided she’d had enough of my s**t.
And I had 36 exposures.
That was it.
But there is something in those photographs that matters more to me today than technical perfection.
I can see the beginning.
In that first image, a peregrine chick peers out from an almost comical mountain of white down. Its enormous black eye dominates its tiny face, while the hooked beak gives away what that helpless-looking cotton ball will eventually become. There is already a predator hiding underneath all that fluff.
In the second, the two chicks huddle together in their rough Arctic nursery, surrounded by grass, earth and the remnants of prey their parents had brought them. They look impossibly vulnerable compared with the screaming missiles that were circling over my head trying desperately to protect them.
Those photographs aren’t simply pictures of peregrine falcons anymore.
They’re pictures of me becoming a photographer.
I didn’t know that then.
I was just a kid with my father’s camera, trying to focus fast enough before an angry bird hit me again.
Maybe that’s why I’m thinking about putting film through that Olympus once more.
Not because film is better than digital.
Not because I’m trying to recreate the past.
But because sometimes it is worth returning to the thing that taught you how to see in the first place.
The shutter still fires.
The meter still works.
The camera still fits in my hands.
And somewhere inside that little black Olympus are almost forty years of memories.
It might be time to make a few more.
