Thinking about photos again, part 2

I spent a lot of the day having an internal dialogue with myself about photography. I'm sure a part of that is me justifying the expense of a new camera to myself, but part of it is nostalgia creeping in.

In high school I borrowed my dad's Nikon F, the "F" standing for Fucking older than me. It was a Vietnam-era SLR, completely manual. I had the one with the light meter in the viewfinder. I shot a whole lot of stuff on black and white film for yearbook, and with the wide angle was able to shoot a ton of natural light stuff that frankly wasn't bad for those analog days.

I used that camera in college as well, a couple of times anyway. Then my senior year I bought a new kit from the local camera shop in Ashland, spending about $350 I didn't have. Stephanie thought it was a really bad idea, so I returned it two days later. Most of the stuff I shot in college wasn't that interesting.

I think it was 1997 that I bought a Canon Elan IIe. The "e" stood for eye, because it sensed where your eye was looking, out of three positions, and focused/metered there. I had two cheap lenses too, one a short zoom, another long. Film sure wasn't cheap, but it didn't stop me from snapping off one roll after another that first winter. In fact, I have a photo of one of the bridges over the Cleveland flats that I took then, framed in my living room. The exposure isn't great, in fact it kind of sucks, I dig it.

In the years following, I'd shoot all kinds of stuff on vacations and coaster trips, all on film. I remember doing so at Busch Gardens Williamsburg in particular, burning through 8 rolls, in 2000 I think. I had a Nikon negative scanner, so many of those images ended up on CoasterBuzz at some point.

I also shot hundreds of pictures at family gatherings. I actually did that for a lot of years, until I realized that for the most part they just looked the same every year.

2000 was also the year I bought my first digital camera. It was a Nikon Coolpix 990, and it operated somewhat like an SLR in terms of its manual abilities. It was almost a grand, but had a neat form factor in that the body split so you could turn it around on yourself (Kara's strange Japanese camera works that way). I bought it because I went to IAAPA that year in Atlanta, solo, and wanted to be able to post stuff quickly. It was a whopping three million pixels.

In 2002, Canon finally made the digital SLR something that humans could afford. By afford, I mean it cost around $2,200. I can't believe I paid that much for it back then. The camera in its class now, the 40D, is a little more than half that. But wow, that really changed things. No more killing film. You could understand what you exposed instantly, instead of having to wait to develop. That really changed the game. Sadly, I think a lot of people still disregard exposure theory, which leads to a lot of photos that look like the camera did most of the work.

Less than a year later, I sold my D60 for around $1,300, and replaced with with the 10D, which is what I have now, five years running. Between the two, I've done a lot of shooting, kind of in spurts. Getting the nice 70-200mm f/4 L in late 2006 really renewed my interest.

I've had two players now in the practical small vacation camera category. The Canon PowerShot S400 served me very well for years, until I broke the LCD at a volleyball tournament. I managed to replace it myself, with a few leftover screws and a plastic piece. Last year I got a PowerShot A710 IS, which allows me to do all the manual SLR-ish stuff, and I like it a whole lot better.

I have about 2,500 photos on my laptop, all taken since late 2005. On my desktop, you can add several thousand more. I have hundreds more from negative scans burned on various DVD's, and I think at some point I'll import all of those and start keeping them all together on a USB hard drive or something.

It's amazing to me how many photos I have from various points in my life, and how relatively few I have from my childhood (in part because people treated film like a scarce resource). I can't imagine what a child born today will have when he or she grows up!