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I’ll start at the beginning: This is the first photo I ever took with a camera of my own. In April 1968, using the basic Agfa camera I received for my birthday, I took this photo and I reckon it’s not a bad effort for a first-timer. It has foreground interest, leading lines, no apparent parallax error, and the horizontals and verticals are well aligned. My older brother is on the skateboard and my youngest brother is watching.

Black and white photos were the default choice in those days, not the artistic option they are now. It was simply a lot cheaper to buy and process black and white film, so it is no surprise that my first photos were in mono. Colour photos, whether slides or prints, were a bit of a luxury. It took a special occasion, such as the school camp later that year, to justify using a roll of colour film, for which I must have scrimped and saved my pocket money.

This is not one of the world’s great photos but there is a story behind it. The photo shows a fellow Year 7 student from Koonawarra Primary School clambering back onto the rocks after she slipped into the water at the Cascades, near Pemberton in Western Australia, during our school camp.

For a moment it had looked like T might be swept away downstream when she slipped into this rapid. Fortunately, the water eddied enough where she went in that she was able to fight against the current and get back to the rock.

When I first showed this photo to my family, they had a real dig at me because I had chosen to take the photo instead of helping the girl at risk. Not that I would have been of any help when there were people closer to her. Other people were downstream from me and an adult was looking for a stout stick to try to reach out to her if she was swept away.

So, naturally, it was my job to take the photo. It’s still the photographer’s dilemma: respond to the need of the moment, or record it for posterity. I have never faced that dilemma in a significant crisis, thankfully, but I have been recording moments for posterity ever since.

As a photographer, I look at this and see overexposure, flare and significant parallax error. I also see a photo taken by a young boy who wanted to a capture a moment. The parallax error would dog me for a couple of years yet.

And what about this shot, in which the parallax error probably worked for me. Our camp activities included visits to a sawmill, the trout farm, and out into the forest to this logging site.

T is there again, seated with her legs hanging over the edge of the felled karri tree. I was probably trying to frame these students in the centre of the shot, but the parallax error led me unknowing into a more interesting composition.

We didn’t have much of a conscience about the demise of trees like this back in those days. I wonder how many of the students here would want to see this sort of forest cut down now?

This photo offers a glimpse into the past, when trees were bigger, 12-year-olds more innocent, cameras used film and phones were wired to the walls. There’s another 40-plus glimpses of the past for me to post as I mark 50TTL.

Next: Photos and memory