A Picture Taker's Journal: Lenses, Cameras, Some Intrigues, Some Liaisons

By David Henschel

This memoir is a look into the thirty-year career of photographer and photojournalist David Henschel and contains nearly three hundred photographs taken during his career.After earning a BS degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia, Henschel spent his first years as a pharmaceutical sales representative but felt the urge to have a self-employed career. Completely untaught but studying old-time film and photographic printing processes, he then began taking pictures but was unsure his ability as a photographer could produce enough income to sustain his family.Freelance photography is an iffy proposition as a fulltime profession, and Henschel goes to considerable length describing emotions tied to having a family to support and trying to balance so much time, energy and money necessary to be a photographer without a regular paycheck. Nevertheless, he forged ahead buying expensive professional equipment and started taking family portraits while still getting a regular paycheck and benefits employed by a pharmaceutical company.Henschel then took the giant leap going out on his own. Along with his portrait business, he began taking pictures for non-profit organizations and several local companies willing to assign work to him, but in the mid-70s Wanderlust took over when Robert Cohn, then Editor-in-Chief of the St. Louis Jewish Light newspaper handed him the opportunity to be the official photographer for an American Jewish Press Association trip to the Soviet Union. It was the springboard, and or the next twenty-five years he took on daunting self-directed voyages to the world's hotspots photographing and writing about challenging situations, encountering political intrigues, making liaisons with people involved in attempts to make changes within their country.What makes his story unique was travel to distant lands, making his own arrangements for interviews without an assigned agenda directed by news organizations.There are some 300 photographs included in this book.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1728783607
• ISBN13: 9781728783604
• Release Date: October 2018
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 472 Pages
• Weight: 1.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.1" x 6.0"