Developing a taste for photography and ice cream

Saw two items in the last week that brought up quite a few memories. The first was that Friday, Aug. 19, was World Photo Day, where people are encouraged to share photos. Historians have noted that photography as we know it began in the mid 1820s, although the first types of photos were crude. Practical photography began in 1839. The first selfie didn’t pop up until much later.

Photography has been a part of my life since my teens or earlier. I was given my first camera by my parents as a present. It was a pocket film camera with a flip cover that had a small built in flash. I took quite a few pictures with it on family vacations. Since then I’ve had several cameras, film and digital. In college at Bemidji State University, I was on the student newspaper and was one of the main photographers, mainly because I was one of the few students who had his own camera. It was then I really started learning about photography and what could be done. Since then I’ve continued learning. One of the biggest changes for cameras has been the change from film to digital. When a person was relying on film, usually the biggest roll you could buy was for 36 shots of photos. With digital, it depends on how big of a memory card you have in the camera. These days I use an eight gigabyte card, meaning I can take 1,000 photos. It was a surprise the first time I put the card in and saw a 1X in the small screen that told me how many photos I had. The nice thing about digital is that you can immediately look at the photo and find out if it’s in focus. If it’s not, you can delete it, creating space for another photo. For anyone who never dealt with film, you had to wait until the film was developed to find out if you had good photos.

Whether it’s been film or digital, I still get a feeling of excitement when I look at a photo and see that it came out the way I wanted it.

The second item was a story about ice cream and how there continues to be different flavors and people creating their own businesses.

For me ice cream, especially in the summer, calls to mind trips with my family to the local Dairy Queen. The one in my hometown of Thief River Falls, began as a seasonal shop. In the 1970s it was small and only open during the summer months. It had two open air walk up counters and I think only enough room for four people to work in it. The best memories I have are when my parents would decide to make it a special outing. That meant we would all get on our bikes after dinner and pedal to Dairy Queen for an ice cream treat. Usually it was one of those warm evenings in Minnesota that we looked forward to in the winter. The sun would be out, there would be a few wisps of clouds and if there was a breeze it was only enough to make it pleasant. In some way the ice cream would taste sweeter and more delicious on those warm evenings.

Other memories of summer and ice cream center on an ice cream truck. There was one that would go through our neighborhood, every so often. Like most it had recorded music of tinkling bells, but as a youngster you don’t care about that. You only cared about that tune and what it meant. The ice cream truck that came through offered scoops of ice cream, but it mainly had frozen treats like ice cream sandwiches, ice cream bars, frozen popsicles and ice cream drumsticks.

There were places where we could eat ice cream throughout the year. A couple of small grocery stores had ice cream they could dish out or frozen treats and there was a Tastee-Freez. While the ice cream from those places tasted just as good whether it was the fall or winter, it didn’t have the same flavor as the frozen treat does on a warm summer day.