Confession Monday

The response to my request to have you join me in "Confession Monday" was underwhelming, so, like any adventuresome pioneer I'm going to have to go it alone.

Let's see, what to confess??? It's not that I'm so pure, I just want to be clever and everything I've thought about confessing is a yawn, and not my journalistic goal..........

OK. When I was a senior in high school I talked my way into being the photo editor of the yearbook. Of course, if I was the big time editor I needed a new camera, and my parents obliged and got me a Memyia camera.

Right out of the box I loaded film in and shot about six rolls of excellent pictures of the students, school and environs. I felt like I was hot stuff until I got the film back and there was nothing on on it, nada, zip, blank, empty...black. I was freaked out. What was going on? Was the camera defective? Had I somehow exposed the film to light?

I couldn't figure it out, and that's when I decided to read the manual. Come to find out the way that camera loaded was very different than the other cameras I'd used, so I had shot six rolls and not one of them had threaded through the sprockets. The only film with any pictures on it was the first frame which had 36 shots piled on top of each other because I didn't load the camera right.

Yeah I know, big deal. Well, it was a big deal! We had a deadline and I was such a braggart about how good I was and then I go and blow it. I was mortified! But there is a happy ending. We got the yearbook out on time and the photos were great, if I do say so myself, and from that time on I have been a manual reader - I won't turn a dial or snap a piece in without out first looking at the instructions, and I'm proud of it!