Chris Abraham

I have been blog-tagged by Jonathan Trenn, Adam Viener, and Alice Marshall. I am to reveal five things you didn’t know about Chris Abraham. Well, here we go…

1) Six years in a Hawaiian all-boys Catholic school - I was voted as “Most Likely to be Famous” by my high school class, an all-boy’s Marianist school in Honolulu, Hawaii, called Saint Louis School. Famous man include infamous. I was also elected student body president and was captain of the speech and debate team. I was also in the “Ranger Club” of my JROTC unit and wrestled at 180lbs. Incidentally, I moved to Hawaii when I was 6 and lived there in Salt Late, Downtown, and Kaimuki, until moving to DC for college at 18.

2) A total computer geek for a solid 23-years - My handwriting has always been appalling. So bad, in fact, that I did homework in elementary school on an Olivetti typewriter. When I was 13, I used my savings to buy one of the first PCs in my neighborhood in 1983, an IBM AT. That bugger had a monochrome monitor, no hard drive, dual 5 1/4″ floppies, and a 1,200 baud modem. I got onto some Hawaiian BBS’s. I had to fake being an adult to get onto the good boards. I envied the amber monitors, although I eventually picked up a color card and a color monitor. I never did buy a hard drive, though, until college. How the hell did I do without a HD? The A: drive always had to have a bootable floppy in there. What I really liked the most about the computer was that the keyboard clicked. It was rock solid and had the most amazing feedback. I had a dot matrix printer. I have been a computer geek for a solid twenty-three years.

3) I owned a motorcycle — After my dad passed away, I invited my buddy to visit me in Hawaii. At that point I had a 1980 Mercedes 300D and a 1974 Triumph TR-6. The 300D died on me. Since Mark was a guest, I needed two rides, so I gave him the triumph to use and I picked up a used a 1982 Yamaha XS 1100 for a couple-hundred bucks. The brakes didn’t really work, but who needs brakes. The bike was fast! A 1.1 liter engine on a standard bike. That was one hell of an awesome deathtrap.

4) An artistic side — My dad was a fine artist and a photographer. While you were learning sports scores and how to hit a ball, I was learning perspective, proportions, foreshortening, physiology, musculature, gravity, the human body, drawing, sketching, shading, highlighting; and, of course, I had been shooting professionally since 1986 and got my first stock photography contract when I was 21, with Pacific Stock, and then later with Corbis (nee The Stock Market). I posses well over 100,000 slides, both mine and my late father, Bob Abraham, and amazing shooter.

5) PADI Divemaster — I have been SCUBA diving since I was 15. It was something that my dad and I loved to do. I progressed through Open Water, Advanced Open Water, Rescue Diver, and then to Divemaster. I started taking the road to PADI Dive Instructor. I haven’t been diving or shooting for years. In fact, I used to shoot with a Nikonos V and have some very amazing underwater photos, including what I call the Jesus Turtle. Since SCUBA takes so much gear, I spent a lot of my days freediving. According to Wikipedia, “Free-diving is an aquatic sport, considered an extreme sport, in which divers attempt to reach great depths unassisted by breathing apparatus.” I was pretty good at it. In Hawaii, you have to carry a dive float. I would kick out to my diving site off of Waikiki and, for shits and giggles, dive down 100 feet with a breath of air (and massive freediving fins) to freak out the divers and piss off the Divemaster and Dive Instructors I worked with.