How I got started as a photographer

(And a few photo essays by John Myers)

I bought my first camera when I was 13. The year was 1961 and I was making the grand sum of 50 cents an hour in my first job, curb hop for a local restaurant. (If you don't know what a curb hop is, you obviously aren't old enough to remember the '60s.)

I saved my money and when school was back in that fall, I sent most of my summer's hard-earned wages, $90, off to a mail-order camera company for a Yashica Lynx 35mm rangefinder.

I was in hog heaven when I got my first roll of slides back and fell in love then and there with photography. The love affair continues through four-plus decades with 35mm Nikon SLRs and in recent years with digital cameras and now with my phone-camera.

If your browser has the Flash plugin, you will see a rotating slide show at right, which is a sampler of a few the full-size images in the photo essays below.

(If you can't see the slide show, get the plugin or view a similar slideshow in a JavaScript version.)

A camera-phone that really works! Photos from my new Sony Ericsson K750i mobile phone-digital camera

Logan on the Mound: photo essay on my oldest grandson pitching in Little League Baseball in Carthage, NC

"Fall has fallen", poem and photo essay on the changing seasons in Rockingham, NC

Moon over Palm Beach: Two ghostly "ladies of the night" in the moonlight on Palm Beach Island, Florida

Poem and photo essay: A Fisherman's Prayer

Photos from North and South Carolina beaches in January.

Take a spring walking tour of Palm Beach Island and West Palm Beach, Florida.

Magical August morning at sunrise on Surfside Beach in South Carolina.

Sunrises and sunsets from Southport, NC; Bahrain Island, Persian Gulf; and Bombay, India.

Biz Photos: What an Internet Photojournalist can do to illustrate your message.