From what I have been able to figure out based on release dates, when Mom went to Europe in the early 1950s, and the time I asked to borrow a camera in 7th grade, I *think* she had a Kodak Dualflex. Process of elimination. Remember, Kodak was THE camera company in 20th century America, the dates they were being sold line up pretty well with when she would have graduated from high school, went to nursing school, met Dad and so on.
Left: A Dualflex III, from about 1950. Right: Dad and me from 1958.
From that 7th grade "Can I borrow a camera?" request I do remember a black, boxy camera you had to look down into to see a dim, monochrome view of the thing you wanted to shoot. And I remember the roll I shot had a lot of blurry duds and a couple of ok shots around Sterling Forest Gardens. Long gone, no idea what happened to them.
The Kodak 104 Instamatic. Released by Kodak in 1963, it's the camera I remember my Mom using. It was a revolutionary little beast at the time, taking a film cartridge that was easy to load and unload, and using a flash cube good for four shots. IN COLOR! Ridiculously easy to use and compact too. I know I got pressed into service to be the one holding the camera a few times with this thing. No wonder they were everywhere.
A classic Instamatic came with one film cartridge and a flash cube. Right, me with my sisters Elaine and Miriam, 1963.
Around 1967 or 68, my sister Miriam ended up with a Polaroid Swinger as a Christmas present. It was very cheap and the film was also relatively cheap and OMG you could see the your pictures in 60 seconds! I don't have any memory of getting a turn taking pictures with it, but I probably did. Besides, the best part was shaking that piece of film around and waiting for the image to appear. There was also a catchy jingle sung by Barry Manilow - and yes, that's a young Ali MacGraw in the ad.
My first camera that I bought with my very own money from one of those gray market camera stores in lower Manhattan was a Fujica Auto-7. It used 35mm film rolls, but it was completely automatic. I bought it because my then roommate Joan and I planned a trip to England and I wanted something to take pictures with. I don't remember what I paid for it, but it was a decent little camera, Fuji always did have nice glass, even in their starter cameras and I shot travel snaps and horse-related stuff with it for years. Mom continued to use it for years after I stopped using it.
Behold the late 80's Chinon Genesis (I think I had the G-7), that zoomed from 35mm to a mighty 80mm, with infrared autofocus. Decent optics, IIRC took nice clean shots.
And then, some time around 2005 or '06, I won a digital camera in some contest at work. Two whole megapixels in a sleek, pocket-sized body that made the Chinon look like a dinosaur. And the whole front of the camera was designed with a slider to protect the lens. Tiny little display on the back. Instead of film that I had to send away, just use a memory card that came with it and load the pictures to a computer. Olympus D-390. Did I mention I'd won it? So yeah, free camera.
Yeah, but - I missed having a zoom.
The Fujifilm 3800 (came out roughly around the same time that Olympus did) was an accidental eBay find. I was looking for something else, the seller wanted to trade up to a better camera to catch new baby moments and I got it at a pretty cheap price. 6 megapixels, pretty good zoom range, somewhat limited in low light. I know I was shooting by 2007 when I got a Flickr account and started putting things on it.
Tripod shot of my kimono-silk regency, using the Fujifilm Finepix 3800.
The 3800 wasn't quite as bulky as the Genesis, but it was blocky and squat. The technology was improving, so I did some research on point-and-shoot digitals and swapped the 3800 for the smaller, sleeker Fujifilm F100fd in spring 2009. 12 megapixels (double the 6 on the 3800), a bit more zoom range, and it was even more pocketable than that Olympus. Great little camera with lots of shooting modes programmed in and they performed pretty well. Decent sized screen too.
The F100fd. Right, a night-mode shot of the Port of Oakland the day I got it.
My sister Elaine came out to visit in the spring of 2014, carrying a Nikon P7000 (hit the market in 2010) that she really didn't know how to use: it seems a friend of hers had talked her into buying more camera than she was willing to learn to use. I offered to trade and bet I could get some decent shots on the day without having seen the manual. The trade became permanent.
Nikon P7000 with all the knobs on. Right: Shot at Monterey Aquarium, there's Elaine and I had that camera less than an hour with no instruction book. Not a bad start.
Nikon had come up with a point-and-shoot camera that had some DSLR-like controls in addition to menu-driven pre-set modes - I think the idea was to give Seerius Fotografers something pocket sized for occasions when they didn't want to lug a big camera. Remember, I was doing ZERO editing except for the odd crop at this point - the color quality was beautiful, even though it was 10 megapixels instead of the Fujifilm's 12. The autofocus could be a stupidly laggy, and like the F100fd, the lens cover blinds started to need a little help opening over time. But hey, free camera and I was willing to try to learn how to use those additional features.
The P7000 got me thinking about eventually making the step up to a DSLR (digital single lens reflex). I picked the brains of friends who shoot with them. Almost all of them shot Nikon instead of Canon. I did my homework, I tried to learn how to use the controls on the P7000 that gave *me* more control of what came out of it. This was also around the time that camera companies were introducing mirrorless cameras for the consumer market. (An SLR film camera uses a system of mirrors to transmit light from the lens onto film. The digital equivalent sends the light onto a sensor. Eliminating mirrors from the guts of a camera allows for a smaller, lighter camera body.) They were expensive, and they were still pretty new technology.
No, I would be smart. I would save up, buy a good used DSLR body and budget for investing in the lenses to go with. In 2018 I found a gently used Nikon D7000 (released in 2010, 16.2 megapixels) on eBay. I sent James the link because the price looked very good and the seller was throwing in a Tamron zoom lens. "Ask the seller for the shutter count," he said. If the shutter count is high, the camera's gotten a lot of use and may be on the road to needing repair. This one turned out to be pretty gently used and it was a case of the owner wanting to sell it and upgrade. So for about $450, I got a very good camera and a decent lens. Since then, I've been able to add a couple of better lenses, again by buying used - with the mirrorless cameras getting more and more popular, DSLR components are easier to get at favorable prices.
Hakone Gardens, first test batch shot with the Tamron zoom in 2018 with James helping me with settings. Right, the D7000.
Will I move to another camera in the future? Who knows? Right now I can do a lot and learn a lot with what I have, and have some fun with it.
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