photography tale: rock climbing
They were hanging from one hand, with the ropes that supported them hidden under the arm to make it look like they were hanging by their own strength. There were two of them, both around 18-20 years old, and dressed for the part of rock climbing in old t-shirts and those ridiculous slippers. They were hanging on a sheer rock face, an ancient slab of some metamorphic rock that had been hauled out of the mountains and dumped on the foothills at the confluence of two great glaciers. To either side, in the frame, were other uneven rock faces; I was standing in a deep crevice in the rock.
I was down below, carefully framing the shot with my first SLR camera, a hand-me-down SRT-101 with a 55mm Rokkor lens. And it was working out pretty well.
We'd been out climbing all weekend in the Rockies (my one and only attempt at the sport, which was interesting but a bit too much of a scene for me), and had stopped at the Big Rock near Okotoks, Alberta. It was the summer after my second year of University, and I'd had the camera for only a couple of weeks.
The scene I describe above was never recorded on film. Being new to SLR cameras, I had failed to properly load the film. And it wasn't the only time it had happened on the weekend, it turned out. In fact, I had nothing to show for hauling the camera up the 50 metre climb that I'd done.
I learned my lesson, though, and I don't think it's happened in the (mumble mumble) years since.
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