All of these images are from my very earliest years in photography. I bought my first camera... a Canon F-tb, with a 50mm, f/1.8 lens when I was fifteen years old from money I earned as a dishwasher in a local restaurant. I joined the high school yearbook committee as a photographer and many of my images were included in the yearbooks for four of the five years that I attended high school. A few of them are included here for nostalgic and posterity reasons. After a couple of years shooting with the F-tb body I moved up to a Canon AE-1 body and then I eventually graduated to a Canon F-1 professional body when I was working in the field. Two of the images here were contest winners in the "Kodak International Newspaper Snapshot awards" that was sponsored by the Toronto Sun Newspaper during the summer of 1980. The photograph of the motorcycle hill climber wiping out on his bike captured first place in Canada in the black and white division and a separate award of merit. I was twenty years old at the time. Previous to that, I had one third place in a weekly judging of the same competition for the sot of three track runners captured in a sharp pan image. There are a few shots from my Ryerson assignment days when I shot for the Ryerson "Eyeopener" newspaper, a few of the images that I had published in the Toronto Star "Have Your Say" column. I also added one image of my earliest attempts at astro-photography. It's a shot of comet "Hale Bopp" that passed by the earth in 1997 and was visible to the naked eye for a record eighteen months. I juxtaposed it against a Ukrainian Church near where I live in an effort to show both scale and to give it a somewhat "mystical" appeal. I'm disappointed with the results of my efforts to capture that great comet but it was my very first attempts at astro-photography and at least I got something of it. I also threw in a few images from my early skydiving photography days and a few shots from my time in harness racing photography.
© Steve Tambosso - "The Wandering Fireman"
