THE SONGS OF A NIGHTINGAIL

  This, of course, is a very famous photo of a sailor kissing a girl.  It happened in New York’s Times Square during the celebration of WWII coming to an end.  I didn’t know the background of this shot until I looked it up online for this post.  I’ve always thought it was simply a sailor kissing his sweetheart.  It wasn’t.  The sailor was on leave in the celebrating crowd, saw the nurse and, thinking she was part of the troops, grabbed her and gave her a celebratory kiss.  She was a nurse, but not part of the troops and didn’t know him from Adam! J A group of sailors on leave – looks like somewhere in the south seas?  Or they’re posing in a studio in front of a backdrop like the fellows below? Here’s a happy trio obviously not in a studio. Do these fellows look disgruntled because they’re still on duty aboard ship? These men are standing at ease around the perimeter of what appears to be an aircraft carrier coming into home port? This is the aircr...

  My first ever camera was a little Kodak Brownie like this one. One of the first pictures I took with my new Kodak Brownie was this one of my beloved and first ever parakeet, Tipi-Tin. A few years later I wanted a camera that could take flash pictures allowing me to photograph people and things inside as well as out, so I asked Santa for this Kodak Starmite camera.  One summer I decided to try using my Dad’s old bellows camera but I didn’t do well with it.  I kept forgetting to manually advance the film and was taking double – even triple – exposures all the time.  They were interesting, but not exactly what I was hoping for and I didn’t know it was happening until I had the film developed so much of what I thought I was getting preserved on film was not.  That was a ‘too bad’ summer. Following the fiasco with Dad’s bellows camera, I bought myself Kodak’s skinny 110 model which worked much better. Next up was Kodak’s Advantix 2000 which took even better picture...