I got my first real camera as a Christmas present when I was probably 6 or 7. It had been my moms camera when she was in college, and for the time, it was a pretty nice 35 mm, especially for a child of my age. It had fixed lens that you had to focus by estimating the distance. It didn't have a through the lens viewfinder, so if you weren't taking pictures of landscapes at infinity, it was a real crap shoot as to whether the image would be in focus or not. I loved taking pictures with this camera and sitting with my dad in the dark room loading the film into canisters for developing, then going back in to make the prints.
As I got older, I inherited several cameras from my dad. The first one I got was a Yashica twin lens reflex, and I finally was able to focus through a similar lens. This improved the pictures I took of people significantly. My dad upgraded to a Mamiya camera at that time. He also gave me a tripod to go with my camera, so I was starting to have a pretty nice kit especially since I was still in elementary school.
The next camera I receive from my Dad was his Minolta SRT 101. My dad preferred larger format cameras, but he always had a couple of 35 mm cameras too. The SRT 101 was the last manual focus camera he had in the Minolta line. He eventually moved up to a 7000 and even got a digital Minolta right before they went out of business. My Dad didn't just give me this camera though. We were on vacation in Canada visiting some friends of his who were from Australia but living in Canada for a couple of years. They were a really nice couple named Eva and Momo, and they had a daughter, Tara. Eva was making dinner for us one night, and me being a really picky eater was nervous about what she was making. My dad bribed me with the camera telling me if I ate whatever she made without complaint, I could have the camera. I remember it was baked chicken, and I really liked it, so it turned out to be a really good deal for me.
I really liked the SRT 101, and I preferred it to the twin lens reflex for a couple of reasons. The first was that the light meter worked in the SRT where the one in my Yashica had always been broken. The main reason I liked it was because I could load up a roll of film that held 36 pictures which was so much more convenient than the 12 exposures that the Yashica had. The main drawbacks to using 35 mm was that the negatives were smaller, so the images aren't as crisp and loading the developing cartridges could be really tough. I used my SRT 101 for many years, and I learned a lot with this camera.
In the late 80's, I got my first new camera for Christmas. My Dad gave me a brand new in the box Minolta Maxxum camera. The Maxxum's were the first auto focus cameras in the world. It had a lighter more plastic body, but it took amazing pictures. I took a lot of pictures with that camera, but the cost of film was always a limitation, and if I did color, it cost money to process too.
In my first apartment, I setup a darkroom in a closet right off the kitchen. I was hired by the dart league I was on to take the team photos, and I developed them and printed them in my little darkroom. My dad had given me his old enlarger, so I had everything I needed. The room would get really hot with me inside, and this made the prints develop really quickly, so it was difficult to do the printing without over developing the prints, but I got pretty good at it.
When I moved into my house, I never setup a darkroom, and a flood in my basement destroyed most of my equipment and prints that I had in storage containers that weren't waterproof. From that point on, I only shot in color, and it was mostly family events and snapshots. I kind of lost interest in the technical side of photography until the digital age.
In 1998 I bought my first digital camera. It was a little Ricoh RDC-2 camera that took images at a resolution of 768 x 576. The images were pretty grainy and not very high quality, but you could take as many as you wanted as long as you had memory to hold them. I loved this little camera, and I took tons of pictures of the kids with it. My next camera was a Kodak that was 1.2 megapixel, and the images were significantly better. A 5x7 print was looking very close to what you could get in film. I upgraded to another Kodak that was over 2 megapixel, and now I could print 8x10's that looked really nice.
My next big jump was the Olympus E10 camera. It was a 4.3 megapixel camera with F2 zoom lens attached to it. The lens wasn't interchangeable, but there were lens attachments available for it. The images it produced were fantastic, and I loved having a real camera body in my hands again. I started getting back into the technical side of photography trying to learn all I had forgotten about f-stops, iso, and speed. I took thousands of pictures with that camera and became involved in several online users groups. At one point me and another guy developed a website and created an even called E-10 day where users in the group would take pictures on a specific date all around the world and upload them to our site. It was a huge success and we ended up with thousands of pictures from that day. We tried to do it again a year later, but as technology advanced, people weren't as excited about the camera the following year and the project kind of fizzled away.
My next big jump was a Canon EOS D60 digital camera. This was Canon's second entry into the prosumer digital camera, and it had a 6 megapixel sensor and interchangeable lenses. This was a real digital camera, and I was hooked. I took it with me everywhere. I had bought several zoom lenses in different ranges and different speeds. I started learning more and more about photography and being able to experiment without worrying about buying film made it so nice. I think Forrest was probably one of the most photographed kids on the planet. I always had my camera with me at every event he was involved in.
My dad eventually bought a digital camera, but he was never a convert the way I was. He loved his darkroom and the smell of hypo when he was developing. Even though we were using different formats, having a real camera again made it so we would have long conversations about techniques and the more technical aspects of the hobby. Between 2002 and 2005 I think I talked to my dad more than any other time in our relationship. He always had questions for me about his computers, and I always had questions for him about photography. We would share our images with each other, and he always had really good constructive comments on mine.
In 2005 we bought the restaurant, and that pretty much brought all my hobbies to an end. I did use my camera to take pictures of the food for the menus and the website, but I had very little opportunity to get away from the place just to take pictures. I did upgrade my camera to a Canon 50D for use at the restaurant, and even though it was a significant upgrade, it didn't have the excitement of my previous cameras.
A couple of weeks ago Sarah asked me if I could help her get into photography. She said she had been looking to get into a new hobby and thought photography would be a good one. She got several of my dad's prints right before he died, and she really loves them. Even though I have been out of the cafe for 6 years, I hadn't gotten back into photography. I bought a really nice rugged camera, and I have taken a lot of pictures of my adventures, but I hadn't pulled out an SLR in quite a while. I dug through all my old stuff and found the D60 and the 50D. I put together a couple of lenses to go with the D60 and gave them to Sarah.
The camera is 15 years old now, so it is on its last leg, but she was able to use it while we went to Northville to visit a historic village and take some pictures. I had a wonderful time with my 50D in hand, and I got some decent shots. More than anything I had a great time hanging out with Sarah and Kat enjoying a hobby together. Photography is about sharing memories, and building memories with family that you record and share for a lifetime is what really makes me happy.
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