A Short History of my Camera Addiction

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Life has become so technological. Our phones are high tech, our cameras are high tech, even our toothbrush contains a computer!

I’ve always had a camera, I can still remember my first one. A little Kodak 100 Instamatic. That was around 1975 and I was about 8 years old. It was a hand-me-down, but I had a camera! I was a somebody! OK, maybe that’s a little much, but it’s better than thinking I’m somebody because I have a listing in the phone book (The Jerk – 1979)

Then came the Pocket Instamatic! I felt like a spy!

Sometime in Juniour High school Dad bought me a nifty little toy. The Kodak Disc Camera. It had a circular negative and the actual negatives were smaller than your thumbnail. It didn’t last long and at the end when you loaded it and pushed the button it would rattle off the entire 15 shots in one fell swoop…which was OK if you were doing action photography, but I wasn’t.

Around 1985 came my Canon Sureshot autofocus point and shoot 35mm camera. Dad thought I was grown up enough to have a real camera and I loved it! I had that camera for a long time until my truck was broken into and it was stolen along with my bag.

So, along came the Pentax Espio with a zoom lens that brought the world in closer. That didn’t last long, the lens got screwed up and my interest in point-and-shoot cameras plummeted.

At the same time we also bought a Canon A-1 Sure Shot underwater camera, goofy looking thing, looked like a toy but we got a few neat shots with it in Hawaii before finally letting it go a few years ago.

Somewhere in there was an Olympus Stylus weatherproof camera…that may even still live somewhere in Kirk’s side of the closet…

Then the “real camera” came along. The Minolta X-700 SLR, almost fully manual, just the way I wanted it. I had a few cool lenses. A good 28-200mm, a 35-70mm, and a fun 17-28mm wide angle. I actually had that camera until about 2 years ago when I gave it to a friend who is still into film and has a Minolta…but his broke. I gave it up because I had moved into the world of Nikon.

But before I got to Nikon I had my first Digital Point-and-Shoot camera. A funky little Canon Digital Elph S110. Only 2 mega pixels, but what a cool little box! And it could do video! Crappy video…but still!

Somewhere in here my brother passed on one of his cameras to me. A great little German camera called a Rollei. 32mm lens, great optics and fully manual…right down to figuring out your own light exposure and distance for metering….I never really got the hang of it to be honest and I suppose I didn’t put as much effort into it as I could have.

In 2004 I was heading for Brazil and wanted a better camera. As a gift for completing my PhD my Dad bought me a Nikon D70 kit and I was fully and completely hooked on Digital and Nikon, all in one fell swoop. The Nikon D70 came with a nice 18-70mm lens, and I picked up a 28-200mm lens to have a longer zoom. Eventually we picked up a 70-300mm G (cheap) lens for longer shots, but I wasn’t ever really happy with the quality on that lens. I found a used 60mm Nikkor Micro lens for a reasonable price and I still love that lens! It’s fantastic.

But one more little point and shoot entered our lives, an Olympus Stylus 770SW capable of going about 30 feet underwater and taking video. Again, you can’t really expect much out of a camera that has a pea sized lens, but I wanted something compact to have in my purse. Trouble was I really never took a shot from it that I liked…regardless of the 7.1 mega pixels. That’s when I learned the mega pixel myth and stopped looking at numbers…and got into lenses. And that’s when life got expensive as the addiction fired up.

I wasn’t quite ready to give up film yet though so just before we went to Greece in 2005 I picked up a Nikon F80 for a song on eBay. I don’t think the seller had ever actually used it to be honest. I wanted a film camera that we could use the same lenses on. And once we had that I was able to part with my trusty old Minolta.

Then Kirk bought me an awesome birthday present a couple of years ago… a shiny new Nikon D300. The main reason being that I needed something that could suffer moisture better than the D70. We’d just spent $300 fixing the D70 because water got in it while I was taking photos for work.

The mortgage was paid off, and the lens addiction was re-fueled. We gained quite a cool selection of lenses….

A Sigma 12-24mm aspherical lens came out of New York and travelled to a friend in Yakima before making it’s way up here. Why such a circuitous route? Because I could save about $600 on it that way.

Then came the fisheye. Again, a Sigma (10mm) since it was ashperical and the Nikon is spherical. The Nikon is also a DX lens and the Sigma is not so it can be used on the film camera. This one also came out of the US and was several hundred dollars cheaper because of it.

Finally came the “Bigma“. A Sigma 50-500mm lens that was also purchased out of New York for $600 less than I could get it for in Canada. That is one heavy monster and only goes with me when I have a vehicle.

Various tubes, filters, flashes, controllers and extensions followed, nothing overly pricey though, unless you actually add all those little bits up.

Then I found out about the Lensbabies. Not terribly expensive lenses and optics, just fun and odd. A different way of seeing through the lens and they give you a lot of creative options.

Then one last Nikon lens. A 50mm prime lens. Pricey, but it is a 1.4 lens so it can be used in low light without a flash. It is a fantastic lens and it is a different way of taking pictures when the lens doesn’t move…you have to. It’s a bit like going backwards in time technologically.

And it’s that backwards trend that has taken me to yesterday when I bought my newest camera. A Holga.

If you add all the current lenses and bodies and bits and pieces up, I’m frightened to think what the final total would be…but I know it is well into 5 digits. But the one thing that has been niggling at me is how sterile photos have become. they are so crisp and so sharp and so vivid that it is starting to make me feel like I did when I realized I missed my old vinyl records because CD’s were too…clean?

So I went down to Beau photo and examined the Holga. For a “state of the art” (circa 1950 maybe..), all plastic, made in China, no aperture setting, no shutter speed control, light leaking, plastic optical lensed camera I could shell over $27.50. But if I wanted to go ultra premium I could spend $40 for the Holga with a flash. I caved and splurged for the flash unit. In fact, the flash is the only reason there are batteries (two AA’s) in the thing. It’s completely technology free really. So now I have a brand new piece of plastic junk (often referred to as a toy camera) that takes a medium format film (120) that I will probably have difficulty finding and even more difficulty getting processed…but I’m excited! Because a whole new world exists. One in which I have very little control over what the camera does and what it produces. A camera that will produce somewhat soft, often blurry photos with vignetting at the corners and the potential for light leaking in if it isn’t taped shut. Apparently the back even falls off sometimes if you aren’t careful.

What fun this is going to be. I am totally excited!

Am I really a geek?