When I was about 12 or 13, Time-Life Books started issuing a subscription series of books on photography. They were very cheap, but much more than my weekly allowance would cover. I persuaded my father to cover half the cost and every other month a new volume would arrive. I devoured them. Initially a series of 8, they subsequently extended the series but we had left the country by then so I only have the original set. Still a worthy source for the budding young photographer.
My first digital camera. Lovely, sleek design. Sometime in the late ’90s I decided digital had come of age and bought this 2MP beauty for something like $700 for family snapshots. That summer I had an epiphany with it on the beach at dawn, realizing how much better modern cameras with auto-focus were than my match-needle, fresnel-screen, manual-focus SLRs and soon I had switched to higher end digital cameras, sticking with Minolta (I had an srT101, an XE-7 and a couple of xD-11s) and getting the Dimage A1, a 5MP all-in-one that I loved, and then their first DSLR the 7D, now both long gone.
I don’t remember where I picked this up but I actually used to shoot with it. In fact, in 7th grade, when I was 11 or 12, I shot pictures of Greenwich Village with it for a group school report. Entirely manual and un-metered and, probably with some minor holes in the bellows I got some nice big foggy, low-contrast negatives on Kodak 120 film with it.
In my desperation to find subjects worthy of photographing around the house, I’m turning to my collection of old cameras.
Stack of coins from long ago travels, with a wooden clothespin on top. The brilliant Fuji 60mm macro has picked up schmutz and fine dust hairs that I can’t see with my weak, unaided eyes.
I used to be a calligrapher, Here, a collection of nibs in an old bicycle tire repair kit case with a few staples thrown in for good measure.
