It's a perfect Throwback Thursday share with a trip down Memory Lane and a BBQ challenge from 2008. Here's the scenario, and it's all thanks to one of my favorite children and family photographers, Carey Schumacher from San Diego.

I have no idea who started it, but somehow it was trash talk in a phone conversation about who could grill the best steak. Carey Schumacher had previously visited the Rangefinder Magazine office in Culver City a couple of times and photographed Molly and me. In fact, I shared her image and the stationery she sent me in a post a few years ago.

A few months later it was game on!  It was Skip and my Molly vs. Carey and her Molly! In a park somewhere in the San Diego area Carey had two grills set up, a picnic table for the judging panel and that's all it took. We were off and running.

I lost the challenge, but I still argue she stacked the deck by knowing all the judges. However, after years of therapy, I've gotten over the loss and managed to live a fulfilling life! LOL

Seriously, here's my point for this Throwback Thursday. There are memories you naturally capture with your camera and then there are those you work to create. Carey's friendship over the years means a lot, and even though we don't catch up that often, it's her effort ten years ago that puts a smile on my face every time I look at the images.

Carey's also responsible for a portrait of me that I've shared a few different times. But it's her comment on a past blog post that makes it even more special.

Here's a fun quality of Facebook. The image above was shared on Royce Chenore's page over a year ago. Recently somebody commented and the thread became active again, coming up on my page this morning.

Royce originally wrote:

This is Circa 1995... it was a publicity photo for the "PORTRAIT 2000" teleconference.... this was in the VERY early days of "electric imaging" now called digital retouch... the photographers submitted "selfies" on FILM of all formats brands and speeds....(selfie...another term that didn't exist) and ACI composited them into one image.... this was EXTREMELY INNOVATIVE AT THE TIME!! Feel free to share and tag others if you wish....

Well, I picked up the phone and called an old friend who I hadn't talk to in a lot of years, Ed Pierce, (front row, second from the end.)  What a kick it was to talk him about this event. Here's what so many of you don't know.

• ​This event actually led to the launch of PhotoVision, which many of you subscribed to over the years.
• There were four events in the series with the smallest being 58 viewing locations and the largest at 80+.
• While some of the locations were in theaters, over half were in hotel ballrooms with satellite trucks. Just the logistics alone, which included a few snow storms, was an incredible accomplishment.
• Ritz Camera had the studio for the production, but Ed Pierce had to help them rig it for the event.
• Each speaker was interviewed live during the event and then there was a 25-30 minute video of them working/teaching, and then back to the speaker live again.
• There was a full panel of operators standing by to field phone-in questions for the speakers - much like a telethon.
• The program was eight hours of live content for each event.

Now, take a minute and think about online education today. This is where it all started! There was no Creative Live or Lynda.com or for that matter ANY online programming. There were no webinars, even YouTube wouldn't be founded for almost another ten years!

But this is also another example of a fun aspect about Throwback Thursday. While in one respect I can't believe how old I am to have been around for this stuff - on the other hand, I couldn't be more proud to have been a very small part of it. Hasselblad was one of the sponsors and Tony Corbell, and I flew to Washington D.C. and were in the audience all day at the live event.

It's hard to imagine a more fun trip down Memory Lane when it comes to photography. To Royce for sharing over a year ago - thank you! And, to my old buddy Ed Pierce, who answered the phone just a few minutes ago, it really is time for you to write a book. You're the one who blazed this trail into video education and helped change so many lives in photography!

Happy Throwback Thursday everybody!

I've shared a few of these pages from the Graphi Studio "Day in the Life of WPPI" albums over the years, and here's one more. These are from 2007, the last year the show was at Bally's and Paris. It's also one of the few pages where I recognize everybody in the images!

From top left to right - Cherie Steinberg and Hedley Jones, Mike Colon and David Jay, David Beckstead and Gary Fong and Vicki and Jed Taufer. And they were all photographed by Catherine Hall, who was one of four photographers featured in that year's book together with Calvin Hayes, Jim Garner, and Victor Sizemore. 

In the second image, we've got Joe Photo and Marcus Bell in the front row. I think that's Brook Todd on one side and Parker Pfister and a hotel staff member in the middle - my guess is it was in the very early morning hours at the hotel. After all, nobody buffs the floors in any Vegas hotel during "rush hour!"  And Catherine, as always, captures the essence of enthusiasm! 

The whole idea behind the project was to document each convention as seen through the eyes of four different artists. The concept for the album was thanks to Maureen Neises at Graphi. The book became a milestone for me each year. It was the perfect way to document the event and capture so many different memories.

Throwback Thursday images are one of your very best marketing tools for your blog every week. Use throwbacks to help remind "Mom" that it's time for a new family portrait. Use your old photographs to talk about how fast time goes by and the importance of capturing those important memories. It's the perfect way to put those old photographs of yours to work planting the seeds for new business today.

And, if you're not blogging about them, take a walk down Memory Lane for your own enjoyment. There are few things to put a smile on your face faster than looking at old photographs!

​Happy Throwback Thursday!

Time to jump into the way-back machine and go back a whole lot of years. It's my senior year in high school and instead of the usual collection of votes for class characters, most likely to succeed, most athletic, etc. somebody came up with the idea of "Seniors Select Outstanding Classmates for Seats of Honor." While I was honored and appreciated the concept, holding an empty chair looks like we're on HSN trying to sell it, or years later, in a bar trying to steal it! 

At our class reunion last summer, I grabbed John Lucrezi, and with the help of Mike Demeter, we did our best to reenact the moment so long gone by in a grab shot at the bar! Mike is a professional photographer in Ohio and over the years he did several family portraits for my folks, and growing up in a small town our mothers even went to high school together. (I shared one of Mike's winter images in a post almost three years ago.)

The fun of Throwback Thursday is the trip you get to take just kicking back in a comfortable chair and strolling down Memory Lane. It's a fun thing to do. Keep an eye out for things that are "fun," because it's one of those words so often lost in the day-in-day-out pressures of business today.

Even if you don't share the moment in a blog post, find your old yearbook and enjoy the trip. And, if your senior year is at least twenty years behind you, think about how much the world has changed. Enjoy how much you've changed, and then do an inventory of your goals from then to now.

Happy Throwback Thursday!

Note: Sorry about the quality of the high school shot - it's a scan from an old yearbook.

When I first got certified a good friend told me that scuba diving wasn't a hobby, but a sickness! I didn't think about it until years later when looking back I started to count the dozens of trips and hundreds of dives I'd done. Diving becomes an obsession, but it's not just about being in the water, but time with great friends. Each trip was like a reunion filled with memories, laughs and fish stories that rival anything fishermen have to crow about.

The group above all hit Utila in Honduras to dive with whale sharks in 2008. It was an amazing trip - great friends, big fish and new memories daily. It was the epitome of everything you want a dive trip to be. Although not until we were leaving die we learn just how good it was.

Typical of dive resorts, everyone typically books their trips on a Saturday to Saturday schedule. That means everyone who arrives on Saturday, from all over the world, sees each other at departure a week later. Well, for all of us, we were the only group to see and get time with the whale sharks. Everyone else, although the diving was excellent, never spotted one of the big guys!

You get to meet each other as your praying for all your bags to arrive. There's nothing worse than losing a bag with your gear and having to delay a great trip because you're waiting for the airlines to figure out what happened. Just the joy of seeing your gear in a pile on the runway is an adrenaline rush!

And for those of you non-divers who think the world of scuba is filled with luxury hotels, beautiful yachts and upscale accommodations think again! But the more rustic the "resort," the more laughs and memories! Just the bathroom in our room was enough of a memory-maker to contribute to the stories of the trip!

One of the benefits of booking a group trip like this is our strength in numbers. On every dive we "owned" the boat which gave the captain the flexibility to do whatever we wanted, which included a couple of night dives along with working hard to spot the critters we'd come most to see, the whale sharks.

The other day while looking through a backup drive from my old computer I found all of these images. The whale shark was captured by one of the other divers, and while it won't win any awards, it won hands down in memories.

The little guy below was on a night dive. I was shooting with an inexpensive FUJI point and shoot in a small underwater housing. If you're not aware of what happens on a night dive - it's pretty amazing. You see virtually no colors in any of the coral, sponges and plant life during daylight, but bring in any artificial light like the flash on your camera or an underwater flashlight and the world lights up with color. There's no manipulation in the color of the coral this spotted eel was hiding under.

I know I shared this in a post years ago, but I don't remember when or where...and that might be part of the fun of Throwback Thursdays. Some memories are too good not to go back to more than once! I also forgot about the shot of "Two-Gun Tony Corbell," and me as a wrangler walked us into position for a photo opportunity.

We were doing a Hasselblad sales meeting at the Westward Look Hotel in Tucson. I'm guessing the year is sometime early 90's. I wanted an authentic looking period shot of the old west with all of us. I'm laughing about how serious I took the group portrait. I remember being upset you could see Mike Bowen's Nikes, but never thought twice about my Porsche Carrera sunglasses! 

There's also a fun sidebar. This was the Hasselblad team, but the photographer who we hired captured the image with his Bronica gear. Plus, forty years later at a high school reunion, I found out I went to high school with him! He just didn't connect it at the time, which goes back to three years in high school where I was "Steve." (I got tired of all the Skippy Peanut Butter jokes, but down deep I've never been a Steve.) He just didn't know he knew Skip.

Well, it's Throwback Thursday, and you need to have some fun with the opportunity to dig out and share a few old images. And, if you don't share them on your blog to remind clients how fast their kids are growing, at least find a few for your own enjoyment.

​Happy Throwback Thursday!

"Looking at old photographs brings back memories and makes us feel nostalgic: it is like a time machine bringing us to the time and place where we can see and feel everything in details."
Chermed

 For ten years, starting around '92, there was a group of us from the photographic industry who went into Yellowstone every winter. While I've written about the trips in earlier Throwback posts, I recently found a few images looking through some older albums. (Apologies for the quality of the scans, but the images weren't stored very well, and I have yet to find the negatives.)

The trips started with just four of us and grew to probably twenty-five at their peak. It's an experience only a minority of the people in the world have the privilege to see and appreciate. It was also at a time before the government got involved, and snowmobiles were allowed in the park, pretty much without restrictions. 

The two scenery shots were actually outside the park on our way up Two Top Mountain. At just over 8000 feet, the snow builds up around the trees and bushes and is then molded by the wind and cold. Mother Nature creates a surreal landscape of imaginary critters, including dragons. It's an endless display of creativity.  

However, as beautiful as it was, I've never experienced cold like that. These images are all back in the film days and shot with a Hasselblad 503CX, my favorite camera back then.  Often the biggest challenge of any trip was keeping the camera warm and in good shape. Most of us used to zip it up inside our jump suits. 

Yellowstone Park has changed a lot in the last twenty years. For example, last week I was talking with Daniel Cox, a Panasonic Luminary, amazing outdoor wildlife photographer and resident of Bozeman. At the time we were going into the park we always saw a lot of elk and some really big herds. Well, Yellowstone brought in wolves to "naturally" reduce the size of the herds. Today, it's hard to find the elk. The wolves have done more than what was needed and the elk stay more secluded.
 
Okay, there's my contribution to Throwback Thursday and my own trip down memory lane. Take the time, even if you're not sharing the images on Facebook or in a blog post, and have some fun looking through a box of old photographs or files you haven't seen in awhile. 

We're all part of an amazing industry, but you can't appreciate the value and trust your clients have in you without appreciating your own priceless moments.