Originally posted by DeadJohn Great sequence.
I'm curious how you have all these photos considering they were done with film. Did you make extra prints for personal use, or when the Navy had no more use for the negatives did they return them to you?
I was a US Navy Photographer and my duty often had me manning the video camera mounted on a small sponson deck on the O7 level, nicknamed "The Greenhouse." Mounted on top of the video camera was a motorized KE28 film camera. It used rolls of 6" film on a spool and when there was a plane coming in for a capture.... and us video camera operators determined something was about to happen "out of the ordinary," we would hit the "red button" mounted on the swing arm of the video camera and it actuated the KE28 and it began shooting at the rate of 3 FPS, if my fading memory serves me right.
Part of my duties also included developing said film and making 8"x10" prints from the negatives. I brought several of these photos home with me as souvenirs. Some were "official US Navy" photos (unclassified, of course) and some were my own personal photos taken with my Pentax Spotmatic during my duties on the flight deck. A lot of the time, I would wander around the flight deck, even when I wasn't on duty, simply because I loved the goings on so much. The noise, the danger, the smells can be very intoxicating. I always had my Spotmatic with me and took photos of lots of things I found interesting.
Often, I'd put on a "slide show" in the evening, featuring photos I shot that day of things many of my fellow photographers thought were rather odd. Photos of rusty bolts, dripping paint, red doors with chipped paint.... things like that. It was always fun, because I had "contacts" aboard the ship that would supply us with lots of free popcorn, cans of pineapple juice, crispy bacon, 3-gallon tubs of ice cream and all kinds of gedunk.
"Pogie bait," as it was often called. Tom, does that term bring back memories?
I might also mention that we developed literally thousands of feed of BDA film (bomb damage assessment). I wish I had some of those to share, but they were all classified. Most were just photos of "interdicted earthen causeways,".... the Navy's term for a blown up dirt road! Others were quite graphic in nature. The gunsight film was the most interesting, in my opinion. To see actual air to air combat film was a real favorite of the photo guys.