The following story was featured in the Spring 2022 print edition of the Inkspot magazine.
10 rows from the starting line of the 1977 Indianapolis 500, a 10-year-old redhead stands with his tan and black rectangular 127 mm Kodak camera in hand, focused on the finish line.
As the cars lap the track, their odometer needles touching 180 mph, the boy aims his point-and-shoot camera and watches through the viewfinder. Pressing his finger to the shutter button, he captures blurred images -- the Indy cars reduced to streaks of color contrasting against clear pictures of the Brickyard’s famous cobblestones.
“That was my motivation for wanting to get a little bit better of a camera,” Mr. Jeff Christopherson said.
With a shutter speed of 1/25 of a second -- too slow to keep the speeding subjects in focus -- and with a roll of film able to capture just 24 photos, Christopherson was unable to record a single clear image of any of the 33 race cars from his place among the spectators.
While the out-of-focus pictures could have been discouraging, leaving young Christopherson feeling negative, the results had the opposite effect. Shooting at the world’s largest single-day sporting event in elementary school only fueled his drive to improve.
“I prefer to think that I've had lots of learning opportunities,” Christopherson said.
After almost four decades of practicing photography, Christopherson “still learn[s] every time I shoot pictures,” finding “better ways to do things differently.”
Christopherson, now in his mid-50s, puts those lessons to work often, shooting everything from concerts to coworker’s engagement photos to Friday night football games and family gatherings… uploading hundreds of school-related photos to a public Shutterfly account every month for students and parents to download free of charge.
While Christopherson knows parents and kids “appreciate the pictures,” photographing school events provides him with what he thinks is a photographer’s most valuable asset -- practice.
That practice helps Christopherson better capture Community’s athletic events each time he looks down the lens -- preserving history, documenting the Iron’s big plays, unguarded emotions, even intimate moments among teammates…
That task doesn’t always feel easy for the veteran photographer.
“Volleyball has always been a tough sport for me, [and] football,” Christopherson said. “There's quite a bit of action, because even if you're not following the ball, there's stuff happening.”
Unlike the spectators who surround him at school events -- watching the scoreboard, anxiously adjusting their positions on the bleachers, Christopherson focuses on adjusting camera angles and locations, finding photo-worthy moments at every event, becoming more familiar with how his equipment adjusts to shooting in different settings.
Each new experience has helped Christopherson fill his camera with higher quality images, because “you're not having to think about how to set the shutter speed or the color balance or anything else.”
The practice pays off, and, Christopherson said, “it becomes second nature to you.”
“You can play around on your own, you can read books, but… I would say once you buy a camera, use the camera every time you shoot pictures…if you look at your pictures, you will learn something that you want to do differently the next time.”
In the Chemistry classroom, Christopherson’s philosophy is hands-on too.
Each year, near the end of October, Christopherson and colleague Mr. Mike Roller demonstrate Halloween-themed chemistry experiments, using chemical reactions to specuatular effect: exploding pumpkins; creating fireballs; setting students’ hands aflame.
When Roller steps behind the lab table, Christopherson steps behind the camera, never missing out on a good photo opportunity.
One of Christopherson’s favorite photos, he said, is “a really cool shot with two pumpkins blowing up.”
Like the pumpkins in his classroom, that favorite won’t last long.
“Basically, when you get the next cool picture, you think ‘yep, that's my new favorite.’”
Christopherson’s development as a photographer has been a long process -- one that he traces the roots to his job selling newspaper subscriptions door-to-door -- a job he would have for seven years.
At 10, Christopherson had hopes of outselling the area’s other newspaper boys and winning the area contest prize -- tickets to the Indianapolis 500.
He took to the streets of Rochelle, Illinois, his hometown, by bike, by foot; after school, on weekends, during school breaks peddling The Rockford Register Star.
Hundred of subscription sales later and Christopherson was one of the 10 northern Illinois newspaper boys, finding himself sitting at the starting line of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, hoping to capture clear images of The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.
The equipment available in 1977 was nothing like what Christopherson has at his fingertips today. Now, he regularly shoots with shutter speeds of 1/1000 of a second -- 300 times faster than a human blink and zoom lenses able to clearly capture far off subjects.
“Usually, the camera that I shoot with now,” Christopherson said, “will probably shoot 4000 pictures on one battery”-- an upgrade from his first Kodak point-and-shoot camera he used in elementary school that limited him to less than 30 photos per film roll.
In seventh grade, after saving up from his daily paper route and summer job detasseling corn, Christopherson could afford to buy his first 35 mm camera -- a $125 Special Edition leather Pentax K1000 -- the least expensive 35 mm camera available at the time.The camera’s light meter, manual controls, and improved shutter speed meant Christopherson could now capture in-focus images at a higher resolution.
“It had a brown body instead of a black body, and I think that’s the only thing that made it a special edition,'' Christopherson said. “But that was the best camera to use, and a fantastic camera to learn on.
As an added bonus, the camera came equipped with an extra 50 mm lens. But good photographers “zoom with their feet,” a lesson Christopherson regularly puts into practice today.
With his new 35 mm in hand, “I learned how to get the action close up,” he said, photographing the natural world, traveling with his parents to national parks.
Capturing Yosemite’s vibrant cascading waterfalls and Yellostone’s surging geysers, Christopherson was exposed to the realm of nature photography, recognizing that “all of [the parks] are beautiful in their own ways.”
When Christopherson was placed in his middle school’s gifted program, he was given the option to add either photography or aviation to his academic schedule. Christopherson opted for photography.
After shooting dozens of rolls of film, he converted the master bathroom he shared with his three brothers into his own darkroom, duct taping the door’s crevices and cramming bath towels in the gap underneath to avoid exposing the highly sensitive Kodak film rolls to light.
“[The darkroom] wasn't particularly well ventilated,” Christopherson said, “my lungs ended up collapsing five times from the bad air quality.”
The chemicals, the darkroom process, the chemical’s effect on his body, Christopherson said, is “what got me interested in chemistry and biochemistry.”
Fascinated by chemical interactions, intrigued by the idea of saving money developing his own film, he spent countless hours in his carefully crafted darkroom learning to mix chemicals rather than buying the materials from Kodak.
“I don't think that really scared me that much,'' Christopherson said. “It was more of just a reminder that ‘hey, you need to have proper fresh air.’’
In the age of digital photography and cloud storage, Christopherson still prints out his favorite shots from school events, pinning them to the bulletin board in his classroom, just to the right of a poster of the periodic table.
“There's something about holding a picture in your hand and looking at it that I still like,” Christopherson said.
Flash forward to high school, and at the beginning of his sophomore year, Christopherson took a role as a stringer for the Rochelle News-Leader -- a freelance photographer.
In between his own baseball games, track meets and basketball tournaments, he found himself shooting photos from the sidelines for News-Leader special editions and features, and for his high school yearbook.
“I would shoot probably six rolls of film per football game,” Christopherson said, “and if I got five in-focus pictures, that was a good game for me.”
While sports were “the most readily available thing” Christopherson could photograph, he continued practicing nature photography with Rochelle’s available “wildlife” -- mountings of animals his older brother David, 18 at the time and an apprentice with a local taxidermist, displayed.
“We got some incredible nature shots,” Chrstopherson said. “You [could] control the light and move [the animal] wherever you wanted it.”
Christopherson’s photos of racoons, deer and wolves eventually captured the attention of Van Dyke’s Taxidermy Supply, a company that sold taxidermy supplies through mail-order catalogs.
“They used a bunch of [the photos] for their magazine cover one year because they were such good pictures,'' Christopherson said. “That was kind of cool.”
When not posting up on the basketball court or posing dead possums, Christopherson found time to work for two photographers in Rochelle -- the only two professional photographers in a town of less than 9,000 -- shooting photos and videos for locals, and occasionally traveling north to Rockford to film weddings.
The professionals, Christopherson said,”would send me out when they had special events because I was the least expensive person to do the job. And I enjoyed it.”
At 16, Christopherson could finally drive his parents’ green 1972 Chevrolet Nova giving him access to a whole new world beyond Rochelle’s limits -- Rockford.
The 30-minute trip became a biweekly pilgrimage for Christopherson, allowing him to participate in a photography club, developing his skills with other practicing photographers.
Each month, Christopherson would submit his photos in the club’s themed photography contest, with a panel of professionals judging his photos.
“I was probably the youngest person there, and pretty much every time I would get some [award],'' Christopherson said. “That was pretty cool for me, to know that the pictures were pretty good.”
The club leaders, Christopherson said, “would teach different techniques, so it was truly education…you learned from the experienced people.”
After graduation, Christopherson enrolled in his first college photography class -- an advanced 300-level course meant for Southern Illinois University-Carbondale’s upperclassmen.
Christopherson quickly realized he preferred polishing his shooting skills on his own over being taught in a classroom setting.
While Christopherson’s interest in photography lies in capturing reality, his college professor focused on “interpreting reality.”
“The professor was weird,” Christopherson said. “That wasn't my thing.''
“I knew the technicalities and I was very good at the darkroom stuff, but that… that was one of the only B’s I got in college.”
To learn the photography techniques required to capture clear, high quality photos, Christopherson preferred “going out of [his] comfort level and experimenting,” relying on mentors at community events to guide his growth.
“When I would go to events, I would try to be friendly with people that I thought had nicer cameras and go up to them and talk to them to find out what they do,” Christopherson said. “And they would give [me] little hints about why they do certain things.”
Today, as Christopherson stands on the sidelines, his Nikon 200-400mm f4 perched atop his tripod, Christopherson is quick to share what he’s learned with members of Community’s yearbook and newspaper staffs.
An informal photo lesson, Christopherson passes on the advice he has collected from his mentors and his own trial and error along the way with students who share his same interest in media.
“That's what I try to do when I see students that are shooting on the sidelines,” Christopherson said. “I don't run from them, I'll try to give them some insights on things they could consider, and things to maybe change or do better. I think that's how we learn.”
Built with Shorthand