I should add, that this was not one of those eureka moments that made me want to become a photographic artist. There was little, if any feedback to be had, other than my own solitary musings about what worked and what didn't. This speeding snowball, frozen in time, just went into a drawer, then maybe a box, a closet, an attic. With perfect, split-second timing, I got the shot. Back then, of course, there was no internet to share our experiments with the world.

I then urged Allan, a natural athlete (but otherwise a gentle soul), to throw the snowball at Jimmy. I deliberately positioned both of the actors in this little drama. The thing is, like a GoPro-wielding YouTube prankster of today, I set the whole thing up. Success! I remember jumping out of my skin when I saw this shot, with the snowball in mid-flight streaking towards my other neighbor, Jimmy, the unwitting participant in this photographic enterprise. Little did I know I would be using a very similar camera to shoot the I Spy books 20 years later.

The preview image of this type of camera is upside down and hard to see. And I was jammed up into the corner of the kitchen because the only lens I had was not very wide, so I missed the focus, which should have been on my mom's profile rather than the cup rack on the wall.

Though the scene sums up my mom perfectly, she was patiently posing for me, not caught unaware. I was just learning how to use a large format camera, a slow and cumbersome tripod-mounted 'plate camera' requiring a dark cloth to cover the operator so the scene could be previewed on the frosted glass camera back. This picture was taken during my first year of art school. She just had a way of quietly removing any stumbling blocks of letting me know, with out much fuss, that my path was clear. My mother had a big influence on me. Not on the specifics regarding the making of art, but for her way of encouraging my interests in it. Having no members of our immediately family professionally involved in the arts, she had no specific advice on how to proceed.

I Spy by Walter Wick