My first camera was (and is, I still have it) the canon ae-1 which I got sometime in 77. What started out as am avid hobby became a job when I started shooting for a local paper. They had 4 different versions of the paper, depending on which town they sold it in. So I had quite a variety of "hometown" events to shoot.

And of course there was also the non assignment stuff that I found interesting and was encouraged to submit for filler when the paper was light on news. What was great is that I had full use of the paper's darkroom too.

It was fun, everyone always loved to see the photographer show up for their various school/town/social stuff. 

Well.....,    the one exception was the kid whom I caught with his father's truck in the river. (He'd taken it mudding and thought the river was a good place to drive it into to wash it off and promptly got it stuck in the river)  He was not at all happy to see me snapping away once he found out I worked for the local paper. The editor was nicer than I though and edited the shot so as not to show the teenaged miscreant's face.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words...

So where do they go when a photograph leaves you speechless?