We recently connected with Dale O’Dell and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Dale, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
CHRISTMAS 1972 The Gift that Changed my Life
In 1972 I was a thirteen year-old Junior High School kid living the life of a very typical suburban boy in Houston, Texas. I was atypical in one respect because, unlike most Texas kids, I wasn’t into sports and didn’t play junior league football or little league baseball. Sports was not my thing. I was into art and science and had a chemistry set that I actually used.
My parents never really knew all that much about me. They never really ‘got’ me or what I as about which led to them giving me some rather strange gifts at Christmastime.
That Christmas of 1972 was strange because I didn’t get an oddball gift. I didn’t get a gun, or a toaster, or an itchy sweater or a sci-fi book they didn’t know I’d already read. I got something I didn’t ask for, didn’t know about or even knew existed. I don’t know why my parents chose it except, maybe, it was vaguely similar to the chemistry set I’d enjoyed so much.
I got a GAF Deluxe Developing Outfit.
I tore the wrapping paper off the box fully expecting to find something that I either didn’t want or couldn’t use and was surprised. Pleasantly surprised! What’s this? Something scientific? Chemical? And it was stuff one would use in a ‘lab.’ Anything having anything to do with a laboratory was totally cool to me. But now that I had a Deluxe Developing Outfit I’d need film to develop. And in order to get the film to develop I’d need to take pictures and for that I’d need a camera.
“I need a camera!” I said to my Dad.
Dad gave me a dirty look. He’d apparently forgotten about that little detail, hoping instead to send me to some dark place to play with my Deluxe Developing Outfit and stay quietly out of his sight.
The Deluxe Developing Outfit had little powdered chemistry packets that, using the included beaker, were mixed with water to make developer, stop bath and fixer. There was a film developing tank and an adjustable film reel for roll films like 35mm, 126, 127, 828 and 120. There were clips for hanging processed film up to dry. For printing there was a little contact-printer box with a white light. Also included was a thermometer and two safelights, one red and one amber. Finally there was a small packet of photographic paper and three little trays for print processing. I’d need a dark room, a darkroom, with running water to use as ‘the laboratory’ for all my cool Deluxe Developing equipment. Unbeknownst to my father his four-bedroom, two-bath, ranch-style Texas home was about to become a ranch-style, four-bedroom house with one bath and one darkroom. Yeah, go pee in the Master Bathroom, Dale is busy developing film. By the time I began setting up my Deluxe Developing equipment in the former bathroom, my parents, Dad especially, were beginning to regret their Christmas gift choice for me. Shoulda got the kid a gun.
In the meantime my Mom scrounged-up a Kodak Super Brownie 27 camera for me to use to take pictures. Hopping on my main mode of transportation, the Schwinn Stingray, I took off for the drugstore where I bought a roll of 127 Kodak Verichrome Pan Film. (Black and White, the Deluxe Outfit wasn’t for color film.) At the school library I checked-out a book about general photographic techniques and another one about black and white landscape photography by some guy named Ansel Adams. Then I went out and took pictures.
Except for one notable exception in 1968 (read Chapter One of my book ‘Photographic Memories’ available from Amazon) all the photography done by me or my family was of Christmases, birthdays and special occasions only. We were the typical Kodak Consumer Family: load a roll of film at Christmas, photograph the years’ festivities, finish the roll the next Christmas, and take it to the drugstore for processing and printing. Then the photos were pasted into a photo-album and promptly forgotten. Riding my bike around the neighborhood with the Instamatic Camera around my neck and looking for ‘artsy’ things to take pictures of was a distinctively different photographic activity than what I’d been exposed to previously. It wasn’t long before I’d shot the whole 12-exposure roll and was ready to head into the darkroom. Yes, now little Dale was ready to go to The Lab.
Carefully mixing the chemistry, I learned about stock solutions, working dilutions and that the Metric System of liquid measurement was much more useful than the stupid ounces, pints and quarts system I’d grown up with. Under the glow of the red safelight, just like on TV and the movies, I unrolled the film from the backing paper, successfully loaded it onto the reel and developed the film. And it didn’t ‘come out.’ The entire roll was black. Completely overexposed. Well damn! This was like my previous photographic experience from four years ago; the film didn’t come out. Back then, even though I’d made the fatal mistake, I blamed the lab; now I am the lab and I’d still failed. Referencing the Photographic Techniques book I’d gotten from the library I finally figured out that film must be developed in total darkness and the red and amber safelights were for printing the negatives onto photographic paper. Yes, those red-light film development scenes in movies are all fake! (And why not? Total darkness cinematography is really boring!)
At this point I’m sure my Dad hoped I’d give up. After the initial failure, the GAF Deluxe Developing Outfit should have been relegated to some dusty corner of a closet but my Dad had never been more wrong. I still had enough chemistry left to develop one more roll of film so I went back to the drugstore, bought another roll of film, shot it, and headed back to the darkroom. This time in total darkness.
The second roll came out just fine. I now had negatives to print! By now I knew the printing process could be carried out under the safelight so I selected a negative, sandwiched it emulsion to emulsion with the unexposed photographic paper and made an exposure using the contact-printing box and my watch as exposure-timer. I processed it in those three little trays of chemistry and…
…I witnessed for the very first time the most remarkable and magical thing any photographer ever sees, the image slowing forming on the paper in the developing tray! (If you’ve ever worked in a darkroom, you know exactly what I mean. For me, and I’m sure many others, it’s a life-altering moment.) I’d finally taken a picture from the camera, developed the negative and made a print. This was totally cool! Somewhere in the ether of The Universe my future stretched out before me and I’d just gotten a glimpse of it. I liked the artistry of the camera and the science-ness of the darkroom. I really liked photography! And to me, photographers were cool. Maybe I could be one?
My Dad was none too pleased with the expense of ‘expendables’ when I begged him to take me to the camera shop for more chemistry and photographic paper, but he bought the supplies for me anyway. After a few more darkroom sessions making tiny, negative-sized contact prints I came to realize wanted to make bigger prints, I needed an enlarger.
Back at the library I learned about enlargers and lenses and gained a theoretical understanding of how they worked. Then I set about finding one I could afford, because the enlarger would be the most expensive piece of equipment in my bathroom-darkroom. Eventually I found one listed in the weekly Shopper want-ad newspaper for twenty-five dollars. I had twenty-five dollars saved from my weekend lawn-mowing jobs (they’ve got big, green, lawns in Texas) and went to buy the enlarger. The enlarger-seller was a guy about twenty years old and was really sad to sell it. He’d just been drafted to serve in the waning days of the Vietnam War and needed to get rid of stuff before he shipped-off. Poor guy! I never heard what happened to the guy but I hope he never got deployed and I hope he’s still alive.
I do know what happened to his enlarger, it went to my darkroom and I used it for six more years.
After moving the enlarger into my ‘lab’ I began making 4×5, 5×7, and giant 8×10 inch prints. Studying the black and white photos in the book by that Ansel Adams guy I upped my printing game and started making some pretty darn nice prints. While I was making enlargements in my darkroom, my Dad was scheming a way to somehow get his bathroom back. Since my Dad was an above-average carpenter and woodworker we made a deal: he’d build me a darkroom in the back corner of the garage and he’d get his bathroom back. I told him I’d move out of the bathroom and into the garage-darkroom the moment it was finished and I’d never seen my Dad work so fast! A few weekends later I had a ‘real’ darkroom with everything I needed except running water. Dad wasn’t a plumber so print-washing from then on involved a garden hose and a hairball grey-water system of my own design. In case you don’t know it, photographic fixer will kill grass.
Now I had an actual darkroom in the garage. And it wasn’t much of a sacrifice of garage-space because our garage had never had a car in it. Our garage was always filled with tools and lumber and bicycles, and at one time, up to a dozen motorcycles and scooters in various states of disrepair and restoration. The great thing for my parents was if they couldn’t find me, I wasn’t out getting into trouble, I was usually in the darkroom.
The gift of the GAF Deluxe Developing Outfit was mostly a success for my parents because it achieved their goal of getting me out of the way and keeping me busy. At first they didn’t care for the on-going cost of buying more film, paper and chemistry but my weekend lawn-mowing money covered most of the camera-shop expenses. After about a year I was a pretty good darkroom technician but I needed another piece of equipment that was out of my reach, cost-wise. I needed a better camera. I begged and sniveled and cried that I really, really, needed a 35 millimeter camera. After an inordinate amount of early-teen begging and whining my Mom finally realized I was serious and gifted me an actual 35mm camera. She gave me her 1950s-era Argus A-Four rangefinder camera. It was way better than the Super Brownie I’d been using but it wasn’t a great camera. It had a fixed, 44 millimeter f 3.5 lens, no light meter, a manual-focus lens (requiring me to learn about depth-of-field to get anything in focus), a shutter that required manual re-cocking after each shot, and a wonky film-advance knob that took an inordinate amount of time to advance the film. But it was 35 millimeter and it would do.
Because of the camera’s shortcomings, and there were many, I learned that that at f16 depth-of-field would get me anything between four feet and infinity in focus. I learned a lot from reading the instructions that came in the box of film. (There was a surprising amount of information on those little sheets, if you read them.) I learned the ‘sunny 16’ rule of exposure and never used a light-meter because I didn’t have one. For the rest of my time in Junior High School I read a lot of photography books about technique, composition and history. Eventually I learned that that Ansel Adams guy was pretty much a Major Dude in photography.
While I was shooting a lot of photos, and spending many hours in the darkroom between 1972 and 1974 my younger brother was busy doing his thing –which was playing little-league baseball, the very thing my parents could never get me to do.
My own baseball skills were, and remain, aggressively awful, however my brother was a decent player and I started going to his games. At first attending little-league games was little more than an excuse to drink sodas, eat Frito-pies and laugh at Texas parents making asses of themselves, but I had my trusty Argus A-Four camera with me and I shot photos of the players. I mainly shot ‘action photos’ of the runners and batters but I also shot a few informal portraits in the dugout. I worked on my action ‘panning’ techniques and learned to anticipate the ‘peak of action.’ I’d take my Tri-X negatives of little-leaguers, make prints of the best shots and then take the prints to the next ballgame where I’d show them to the players’ parents. Then something happened I didn’t anticipate. While I was fishing for compliments on my incredible photographic artistry, the parents were buying my pictures! Whoa! I can make money doing this!? As it turned out, for the entirety of my brother’s little-league baseball career, I’d developed a nice little side-business selling photos of little baseball players to their Moms and Dads –and it paid better than mowing lawns! I made enough money to finally get rid of that wonky Argus A-Four and got a ‘real’ SLR, a Canon FTb complete with three lenses. Baseball was good for me, but not as a player.
Within two years of receiving the Christmas gift of the GAF Deluxe Developing Outfit I’d become a good enough photographer to join my High School yearbook and newspaper staff as a freshman, something you usually couldn’t do until you were a junior. I shot for my school until I graduated in 1977. I got a part-time job working in the portrait studio of a local department store. At the same time I shot photos for numerous local weekly newspapers including a publication devoted to the local motocross scene (dirtbikes were everywhere in the 1970s and I had one too). I shot portraits and made photos for publication in small companies’ brochures. I even shot my school’s Junior Prom when I was a sophomore when the ‘professional’ photographer didn’t show up! I made more money that night than I’d ever made before! I joined camera clubs and got to hang out in great big photo labs and cool photo-studios. I met all sorts of photographers, designers, lab-techs, printers, models and, in an odd twist of fate, I met Ansel Adams himself in 1976.
That’s the story of the GAF Deluxe Developing Outfit. I’m pretty sure it was a ‘throwaway’ gift that my parents thought I’d use once and forget about. They, nor I, had any idea it would ultimately lead to a photography degree and a fifty-year career.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Dale O’Dell lives in Prescott, Arizona and is a professional photographer and digital artist. He studied photography and philosophy in college and earned a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Photography in 1982 from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Since 1979 he has exhibited in over two-hundred group and solo shows, his works have been exhibited and published internationally and he’s written for most of the leading photographic magazines and journals. He is a consummate experimenter and innovator and works with diverse subjects in a variety of styles. He has published nineteen art books and is currently at work on number twenty and twenty-one.
He uses modern digital technologies to create artwork in a variety of styles. “Using the power of technology and an active imagination there are few limitations. I’ve produced straight documentary-style photos, advertising, editorial illustration, street photography, portraiture, landscape, infrared, night and astronomical photography as well as abstract-expressionism, impressionism and surrealism. You won’t find me making the same image over and over.”
Despite their photographic origins, Dale’s images are best described as ‘photo/digital artworks’ and are not all straight photographs. He has fully embraced the digital revolution of photography to explore expression beyond traditional photographic limitations.
Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?
I don’t know much about NFTs although I’ve tried to learn. It seems to me that an NFT is actually nothing, just a line of code, not actually a ‘thing’ at all. I heard about NFTs when I saw on the news that some artist had sold one for millions of dollars. Any time an artist (especially an unknown artist like the NFT seller) manages a multi-million dollar sale that gets my attention so I tried to researched NFTs. What a learned sounded more like a scam than an actual business model. What’s the value of (and why would anyone want) something that doesn’t really exist outside the virtual world? I understand that the buyer of the million-dollar NFT only owns a copy of the code, and the purchase did not include a transfer of copyright. I don’t get the point!
The NFT seems to be no more than an expensive plaything providing bragging-rights for billionaires. I suppose the ultra-rich can afford to spend money of ephemeral things like NFTs but most folks, when they spend their hard-earned money, want an actual thing to show for their purchase.
I think NFTs are a temporary flash-in-the-pan. A shiny object capturing the attention of the wealthy. Ultimately meaningless, ultimately worthless. But this is technology and difficult to predict. I could be wrong. For now, I have no interest in NFTs.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
As a creative artist, everything is rewarding! I never really wanted to be a self-employed business-owner but I learned that in order to work as a creative you really can’t succeed working for someone else. After spending four years post-college bouncing around from one miserable corporate job to another, I opened my own studio in 1986. With all the perils and pains of a running a small business came freedom and I could choose what assignment I wanted and had control over how I did it. It’s very exciting to be paid to do something creative that you love.
I enjoy the problem-solving required on-the-job. One time while working as a cinematographer on a film I figured out how to do a special-effect shot without using computer-graphics or having a budget for effects. The final shot looked great and looked expensive! It was perfect for the film, it moved the story along and didn’t blow our already limited budget. It was immensely satisfying to solve a technical problem creatively, get a great looking shot and make the director and everyone on the set happy.
Although I don’t do much commercial photography any more (instead making self-produced fine-art images) I do collaborate with other independent artists from time to time. Because of digital self-publishing I now work with many independent musicians and self-published authors. Musicians can now record, mix and self-publish their own CDs and I work with them to produce the cover art. I enter into a creative collaboration with the band to create the concept for the CD cover and then do all the photography and graphic design to create the artwork. I then work with the CD manufacturer to produce the artwork to their printing specifications. I love it when bands sell CDs after concerts and I see their fans walking around carrying my artwork on the CD.
I do the same with authors to produce book cover artworks. I get to meet interesting people, read interesting books, listen to interesting music, and create interesting artworks that compete directly with well-funded bands and authors in the marketplace.
When I have to work strictly as a businessperson it’s not especially rewarding but everyday I work as an artist is always rewarding.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.dalephoto.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dale_odell/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dale.odell.92/
- Twitter: I don’t tweet
Image Credits
All photos credit: Dale O’Dell