POP is an acronym for Perverted Old Photographer. That is me. I am an actual photographer, I shoot wildlife, landscape, pets, and models. I hate shooting babies or weddings. Do not ask me why, I just do. Some stories will be based on my life with my cameras. Most will purely be fantasies I put on paper. Which is real, which is fantasy, that is for me to know and you to wonder.
Hopefully, POP will have multiple adventures. Let us see how well Pop's adventures are received. I wanted to lay a foundation and then build from there.
I do my own editing through Microsoft Word. This is my work. Photography and now stories are my avenue of artistic expression. I hope to get better with the stories. I hope someday to integrate my photography with my stories. We shall see.
No one underage has sex in this story.
Again, it is a STORY. Not real life, or was it?
I give literotica.com permission to print.
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Where oh where do I begin? Please see this as a semi-diary of a Perverted Old Photographer, hence the acronym and nickname Pop. So just call me Pops. My real name is Randal Smith. My friends and family call me Randy, Ran, sometimes doofus. Ok, that was my dad's pet name for me.
I started my journey of photography at an early age. My dad came back from Vietnam with many souvenirs from the war. Luckily, he came back. Dad was stationed at a firebases many times while stationed in Vietnam. He was a chief warrant officer and repaired helicopters. More specifically, the electronics in the helicopters. One point in his career the Army gave new orders and flew him out of the firebase. The next day the Vietcong overran the firebase killing many American and South Vietnamese soldiers. I was close to growing up fatherless. The good Lord was watching out for dad.
Well, dad came home with a slew of electronics including my very first camera. His pride and joy, the Akai reel to reel system, was untouchable. It loaded just like a movie projector and when he played Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries our windows would move. The whole neighborhood knew when dad played his classicals on the Akai.
Dad never used the cameras, I have no clue why he bought them, other than they were cheap overseas. When I was around 10 years old, I asked him if I could have them, and he said yes. I started with the 35mm Petri 7s. I found out quickly that I had to learn to compose and think ahead for each shot as my allowance couldn't afford unlimited film and having them developed at the local Fotomat stand. It is not like today's digital cameras that you can take hundreds of shots, then hope you have one worth editing.
A few years later I went from the Petri to the Mamiya c3 double lens 6x6 for more formal settings. I loved my Mamiya as it had three interchangeable lens and was great for shooting portraits. I learned in my early teens that girls loved to be photographed, they loved being the center of attention.
In high school I shot for our school paper. I got the position of school photographer as I had the equipment! I guess I was the photographer by default. We lacked high tech equipment but made up for it with ingenuity. I would develop the film, we would paste the photos and format the articles, then use the xerox and mimeograph to produce the final copy.
I found out that my fellow students liked to experiment with me. Two of our entries won interschool art contests. One went to the states final.
One day during summer vacation, we were down at the river, at our favorite swimming hole. Just a bunch of teenagers having fun. It was getting later in the afternoon and the crowd thinned considerably. Our group dwindled down to just three of us. Me, my friend Robin and the editor of the paper, Linda.
Robin was a cute redhead, petite with well-developed breasts. She was the product of hippies and was less inhibited than most high schoolers. She was around 5'2", 90 pounds at the most. Linda was the exact opposite as she was 40 or 50 pounds overweight and tall. She was the only one that day not in a bathing suit. She opted for cut offs and a t-shirt as she was self-conscious of her body.
I grabbed my camera and was pondering what I was going to shoot. Robin was lying on her beach towel and asked me what I was doing. "Well, it is gorgeous out and I was thinking of getting shots of the river. I saw a heron down river a little way. I will see if I can sneak up and get a shot."
"Why sneak up when you have willing subjects here?" Robin said as she looked over at Linda. I could tell Linda was uncomfortable as she was fidgeting. She did not like to be in front of my cameras, she made that clear many times during the school year. It was only moments later that Linda made an excuse to leave and shortly walked the path to the cars.
That left Robin and I at the riverbank with the golden hour approaching. She was doing typical poses and then started with more risqué poses. She even removed her top and put her arm across her chest. My jaw about hit the ground. That was my first bikini shoot. Looking back, it was very mild compared to today's shoots.
That fall my parents went out and bought me a Canon AE-1 Program as an early Christmas present. They knew I lugged that bulky Mamiya into the woods to do my wildlife photography. It was not practical as a wildlife camera, but you use what you have. The Canon AE-1 Program was much lighter and more versatile as it was my first single lens reflect camera. With the money I had saved this summer I purchased a couple extra lens for the FD mount. One was a 500 mm mirrored telephoto and a 2x converter. I now have a 1,000 mm lens!
One beautiful fall morning I was up before dawn putting on my camouflage clothing, my rubber boots, face netting and cover scents. My clothing looked pretty much like a modern day ghillie suit the armed forces use. I jumped into my dad's Dodge Power Wagon and headed out to the woods. We lived in farm country with numerous patches of woods, pastures, and transition areas. Transition areas are the row of woods between grazing fields and the corn or wheat fields. These may only be 30 to 50 yards wide, but they are teaming with deer trails. Deer will use the transition areas to go from their morning bedding areas to feeding to afternoon bedding to evening feeding. It is through studying signs such as hoof prints, scat, feeding areas, rubs or scratches that you figure out the deer's routine.
I had my tripod set up with my camera on it in a washout. The washout was only about five feet deep and hid most of my body. If someone were to look down in this washout, they would think a green bush popped up out of nowhere. This washout was at the edge of an unharvested corn field.
Amazingly all things become more acute when I am out in the woods. I can hear every leaf in the wind, chipmunks running and chasing their mates, the squirrels still in the treetops squeaking and barking at their neighbors. Every so often the screech of a red-tailed hawk will be heard.
The morning was chilly as it was mid fall, not yet cold but you knew the cold was only weeks away. I could see my breath when I first set up but when the sun came up it soon warmed up nicely. The trees had started to change colors but still had the majority still hanging from their branches. A slight breeze caused the leaves to drown out most noises this morning.
I heard the unmistakable crunching of leaves as something was coming straight for me. I had my camera ready, every so often lifting my head from the viewfinder to get a broader perspective. It was coming closer, by now I should have seen the antlers at the very least. Nothing. Crunch, crunch, coming closer. What is it? If it is another squirrel, I will be having my favorite dish tonight, squirrel pot pie. Closer, it comes. Then I saw red fluffy ears. It is a red fox. I took several shots as it kept coming closer to me. Surely with a fox's nose it will smell me soon and run away.
Nope, the fox kept coming. It soon came to the edge of the wash out and came down the side. It stopped at the base of my tripod, looked up at me, then proceeded to run between my legs and up the other side. I stood there dumbfounded. I had such an intimate encounter with a creature known for it's cunning and elusiveness.
That is only one of many encounters that made me fall in love with wildlife photography.
I loved that Canon. Because of that camera, I have been a Canon man all my life.
I still relied heavily on the Mamiya for the portraits, but I had options now.
The next evolution of my career, I was receiving requests to shoot graduation portraits. Not the formal photos that appeared in the yearbook, these were the ones mommy paid for. Yes, I had moms who thought they knew photography better than me, telling me how they wanted their daughter or son to pose. Funny thing, when they bought the originals for reproduction, they happened to be the poses I suggested.
