I was eight years old.

This part of the story is seared into my memory. My dad and I took a walk up a trail from our campsite and he let me take a photo with his camera. I remember that he told me to compose the image with a rock in the foreground, to give it scale. So that’s what I did. All these years, I remembered the photo, with that rock, a valley, a distant mountain. I remembered that the rock was on the left side of the image.

Time passed.

Seven years ago, I cleaned out my dad’s house. I didn’t keep a lot of things, but I held on to a big box of slides. I was able, without much searching (because my dad was a reasonable good labeler) to find the slides from that summer vacation when I was eight. And there was MY photo – framed exactly like I remembered.

Today, one of my photographer friends’ Instagram post referenced a slide-scanning app called SlideScan. And you know what I did then.

And so, here I present the very first photo that I ever made, rock-for-scale and all.

near Twin Lakes, Colorado
photographed summer of 1964