I’ve never written a blog before. I’ve read blogs and follow some. But this is a first for me.
I’m a 54 year old guy that always loved photography but didn’t choose it as a profession because of one adjective, “starving”. I didn’t want to be a starving photographer and also at that time I didn’t want to leave the small Southern Illinois community where I had grown up. So my life took a different path, while photography was just a serious hobby for me. Now due to my age I and some other issues I’ve started pushing the career I should of chosen many years ago.
I started taking pictures at a very young age with a Kodak 126 Instamatic a very cheap Kodak 126. I suppose my parents got me this camera because I was always wanting to use theirs. My father had two cameras. A Argus C3 which he shoot slide film in and a Rolleiflex twin lens that he brought back from Germany after the war. My mom had a Kodak 126 Instamatic but it had a motor winder that advanced the film. I have no idea how much her camera costs but she didn’t like a young kid handling it. After all I might drop it and break it. And so I started shooting pictures. To the amazement of my mother I never took long to take a picture and I would get the shot. I still don’t take long and I get impatient with photographers that do. Push the button, take the damn picture and move on!! My next camera was a Kodak Instamatic 110. I wanted a camera that I could slip in a pocket and wouldn’t be a burden to carry around. (My wife would like it if I still only used that camera today, especially when we travel and I load four bags and cases in the car.) Taking pictures on school trips made me popular with everybody, and for a kid that wasn’t popular that was important to me. Everyone wanted me to take their picture and then see the pictures when I got them back. Fame. As a side note it was a camera that got me a date with my first girlfriend but that’s another story for another time. A few months before I turned sixteen my family went to the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. I noticed all these people taking pictures of the flowers with their 35mm cameras. What they were doing looked neat and interesting. A Pontiac Trans Am or any car for that matter was out so I decided I wanted a camera for my sixteenth birthday. I didn’t know anything about 35mm cameras and I didn’t have anyone to ask, so I started doing some research. Now remember this was a long time before the internet and I lived in a rural community so I had limited resources. National Geographic a few other magazines and Bennett Brother’s Blue Book catalog from Chicago. National Geographic was a major source of research for many young men before the internet. I think I read every ad about cameras in all the magazines and about every camera the Blue Book had listed. Most of it was greek to me. Nikons were the choice of professionals but I knew my dad wouldn’t go for spending that much money for a camera so I settled on a Minolta SRT 201. Which was in the middle between a SRT 200 and a 202. Now which lens? The standard lens in the day was a 50mm and since I didn’t know that much about f stops I choose the f1.7 rather than the more expensive f1.4. When my birthday came I had no choice than to read the book. After all I had never even handled a 35mm SLR let alone load film or set the exposure. Reading that book taught me things about photography that I still use today. (I’ll discuss a Minolta SRT 201 and bokeh later.) The first picture I took with my new camera? My sister-in-law standing beside her car. That’s all the shoots on this roll. I’ll load a new roll and get back to you later.
No comments:
Post a Comment