First off, it's important to understand I'm not an equipment junkie, but in fact the antithesis of an equipment junkie. I could spout off quite a bit about the equipment cult, but will save that for another blog... ;-)
That said, I often think about some of my old cameras, and am sad that I sold some of them over the years--either to raise a little cash, or clean out a drawer. Here's my list of cameras I've used over the years to do my photography.
Brownie. My first camera, a hand-me-down, somewhere around 1973. This took 120 (?) roll film. It lasted all of about 5 rolls, when I got my first....
Instamatic. I believe it was an Agfa, in 1974. Used 126 cartridges--remember those? Fun little camera. When I started taking photography class in middle school, my parents though I needed something a little more serious and bought me a...
Yashica Rangefinder. Awesome little camera, in great condition although it was thoroughly used. If you've never used a 35 mm rangefinder, you probably don't understand the cult following they have. There's just something magical about them; they are beautiful machines. But of course I didn't have enough appreciation for it at the time, all I wanted was an SLR. But not being able to afford an SLR, I scrounged and was eventually able to just barely afford a...
Cosmorex SLR. What an amazing piece of Soviet steel this thing was. Taking a photograph with a Cosmorex is almost like holding a Humvee up to your forehead an waiting for the click. The light meter wasn't TTL, it was a large solar panel (not unlike that seen on a the old Mir space station) on the front of the prism housing where you are used to seeing the words "Nikon" or "Pentax". But it worked, and it was very rugged and took my constant abuse. I never sold this camera (probably because nobody would have bought it), and supposedly it's in a box somewhere in a storage shed at my sister's house in Nevada. Maybe someday she'll find it and I'll get to mess around with this Russian diamond in the rough again. Since the Cosmorex used standard Pentax screw-mount lenses, I had to carefully choose my SLR "upgrade" so I would just be replacing the body, and ended up with a...
Yashica SRL. Good camera, a lot lighter than the Cosmorex, had TTL metering. It lasted quite a few years, considering it was already well-used by the time I bought it. It did take some abuse, too. It followed me across four continents, and even survived being dropped on the marble floor of the airport in Guatemala City when my strap broke. The meter started going wacky, and I learned to work around it, eventually getting good at shooting without a light meter. Sold it at a garage sale for $30 in 1984, right after I found a department store having a 4-hour sale and got an insanely good deal on a brand new...
Nikon FG. This was a workhorse from 1984 until 1999. It had to be rebuilt once when the mirror finally gave out on a Central Coast trip around 1993. I will never sell this camera, but will also never use it again. It is now holy, and some day may reside on a small shrine in my living room, but for now collects dust in a drawer. In December 1999 it was replaced with an...
HP C200. My first digital camera, a Christmas present. What, HP--I thought they made computers? 1 megapixel. Cheap. light, easy to use, and all-around awesome. It really changed the way I photograph; it felt so free to run around clicking away, not having to change film (getting hundreds of images on a memory card), and not having to spend a cent on developing. I was making *and selling* some pretty amazing photographs, with a 1 megapixel point-and-shoot digital camera! But eventually I needed more, and in May 2003 decided on the...
Nikon Coolpix 5700. The main criticism of this camera (not by me, but by many others) is that it's a "digi-cam", not a true DSLR. That is, when you look through the viewfinder, instead of looking at an image projected on ground glass, you are looking at an image captured on the light-sensitive chip and displayed on a screen similar to when you use a video camera. In some respects, I like that better than ground glass. I can plug a monitor (TV) into my camera, and frame my image on the large screen--almost like using a view camera. It lets me shoot in B & W, and *see* through the viewfinder in B & W. Try that with a DSLR! At 5 megapixels it's certainly not state-of-the-art, but it's close and I don't see a pressing need for better quality. It lacks interchangeable lenses, but the zoom lens that comes with it (after all these years of photography, my first zoom lens) is an amazing piece of glass. I did have some trouble with this camera off and on for about a year, where it would suddenly start over-exposing images to the point where they were solid white. But I figured out this was clumsy fingers accidentally pushing the wrong buttons and re-setting the exposure on the camera. They now make an 8700 model--same camera, but 8 megapixels instead of 5. This camera will probably suit me for another 2 or 3 years, after which it will probably be time to move to a Nikon DSLR, although I would not rule out another digi-cam. It took me about a year to become comfortable and productive with this camera, and I hate to think of losing another year trying to adjust to another new camera.
Those were (are) my primary cameras. Other cameras I have used over the year include:
Nikon EM. A great back-up/second body during the Nikon FG years. Controversial because it was Nikon's first all-plastic body. Very lightweight. Surprisingly good camera.
Nikon Action Touch. Bought on a whim in the late 1980s in Hawaii, this became my wife's primary camera but was used by me in certain situations--not just for underwater photography, but also for mountaineering trips. This camera died a couple years ago, and it was a sad day. One of the best cameras Nikon ever made--and that's saying a lot.
Polaroid. Yes, I owned a Polaroid for a while. Experimented with it, but didn't think much of it.
These next three cameras are graphic arts cameras I used while employed in the camera department at a large communications company while working my way through college.
Deadliner. The Deadliner had to be one of the funkiest "cameras" ever made. It was in essence a very large photocopy machine, which photocopied paste-up art onto plastic "blankets" which were then heat-transferredto large metal plates that could be used directly on the printing presses. There was no intermediate step of a film negative which had to be exposed onto a light-sensitive plate. It was designed for very high throughput operations, which we were, and the quality wasn't that great (which was OK for our application--printing large quantities of free publications on newsprint). In off times, I did experiment a little by taking some of my high-contrast work and burning it onto the back (silver) side of some plates. The effect might have been pretty cool had it not been for the fact that the image itself was done in a special photocopy-like toner that at best came out as a dark gray but never got to a nice black. Like all technologies I used in the pre-press darkroom 20 years ago, this has gone the way of the Dodo Bird. If I ever die of cancer, it will be because of all of the strange chemicals I was exposed to using this camera.
Stat Camera. This camera was your standard camera used to make copies of line art as well as turn continuous-tone prints into halftones, all for use in paste-up. It was about 4 feet tall. The most fun I ever had with this camera was when I stuck my head onto the copy board and hit the exposure button. Of course I had to close my eyes because the camera had it's own lighting system and would have blinded me. The resulting photograph was then copied 4-up, hand colored in a simple geometric pattern with highlighter pens, and turned in as a "self-portrait" for my art class. Got an "A" on that assignment.
????. I don't even know what to call this camera, but it was pretty cool. The entire thing was about 15 feet long, 7 feet high, 5 feet wide. It had a large bed where you placed paste-up artwork; you pressed a button and the bed then titled at a 90 degree angle. The image was then exposed (through a lens as big as your head) on a large sheet of film and automatically sent through a large film processor. So basically you stuck the artwork in the front, pressed a button, and a few minutes later the developed, dried negative plopped out the back. A little more complicated than that, but that's a good overview. The film came on large rolls about 24 inches wide. When this camera ran out of film, you had to open a full-sized door, step into a chamber about the size of a phone booth, memorize the position of everything, then turn off the light and load the new roll of film (which weighed about 30 pounds) entirely by feel. On more than one occasion, I would run out of film, go to change it, only to be denied because the door was locked from the inside. Seems some employees had found the film changing room to be the perfect place to hide and snort cocaine during work hours. It *was* the 80s, after all. Instead of snorting cocaine, I used my free time to shoot large negatives of my high-contrast photographs with this camera. The negatives were poster-sized and I could then contact print them onto large pieces of photo paper. I still have a few of these prints around the house; they've held up surprisingly well considering that was almost 20 years ago, and the processes we were using were far from archival (in that environment, a negative or a print only had to last until the press run was done, which was usually a few hours to a few days).
[ photograph above: Mt. Whitney, 1995 -- taken with the Nikon Action Touch! ]
