A Picture Taking Fool

It’s funny how some sayings show themselves to be true. Like: “You reap what you show”, “You’ll get yours in the end”, or, “What goes around comes around”. Etc.

At one point in my life I bought myself a used Pentax K 1000 camera and became a picture taking fool. I would take pictures of anything and turn it into something beautiful. A crack in the sidewalk, a spilled bag of peanuts or even a cow making chips.

I soon found out ways of making money with my camera, so I went out and bought equipment to go with it. Lenses, filters, tripods and another camera. My girlfriend even bought me a very large and very expensive camera bag to hold some of my gear.

One day, a guy that I worked with came up to me with a real nice camera that he wanted to sell. A stolen camera. A real nice stolen Pentax K 1000 camera which I bought from him for fifty dollars. We lived on a small island, so I asked him who I was looking for. “A lady in a white Jeep”. He replied.

I asked around and found three ladies who drove white Jeeps. Two owned cameras, and both still had them in their possession. Cool! My duty was done and my conscience was clear.

A few weeks later I set out on a road trip for Florida , (via a greyhound bus) to visit my parents. My camera bag and all of it’s contents were too big to carry on, so I stowed it into the compartment below. I did however, take one camera on the bus so I could capture images along the way. But by the time I got to Florida , my camera bag was gone.

You see! Do you see? Despite my meager attempts to find the rightful owner of that stolen camera, in the end, I was left standing there with my original camera, a used Pentax K 1000, and what I was then, was a picture taking fool.

Michael E. Allen