Tour de Camera. Part Two.

After my adored Fisher-Price camera ...

... I moved on to a series of 35mm cameras. I just don't have accurate documentation ... or a good enough memory to recall them all. I did find this classic picture of me in 9th grade. With my friend Jeff Jackson. One of the funniest guys ever. I can't believe I'm posting this picture for the world to see. My awkward years really extended from about the time I was 10 until in my mid-20s. Sad. Please note that I'm holding a hand-me-down 35mm camera that I used for years. It got so loved that I had to duct tape the battery cover closed or it wouldn't work. I'm pretty sure it was a Vivitar. What memories!

We better move on quick before that image of my brace face starts freaking people out.

I got my first SLR as a Christmas gift when I was in high school. About the same time I rediscovered the stash of National Geographic magazines in my basement (thousands of them. My dad didn't like throwing magazines out). I decided I had found my future career. I would be a National Geographic photographer and travel the world. I still think that would be amazing. I'll keep it on my wishlist. I still have that first SLR ~ a Ricoh KR-5 Super II. With manual everything, including focus. I pulled it out for the first time in forever and snapped these pictures of it just the other day:


Sadly enough I never learned how to use this camera to its full potential. I'm very tempted to pop a roll of film in there now that I actually know a thing or two and see what I can do with it. But back when I first got it I basically kept it constantly on a shutter speed of 125 and then rotated the aperture ring until the camera gave me the green light. Literally. There was a meter on the far left side that showed a red + sign if you were overexposed, a red - sign if you were underexposed, and a big green circle if you were properly exposed.

Despite never going beyond the basics of learning how to focus, I did get lucky once or twice and have some pictures I took with that camera that I still love -- such as this one of the Colosseum in Rome:

And here's proof that my love for silhouetted trees in sunsets started a long time ago, with this shot from 1994:

This was also the camera that got me through a few photo classes in college. The only one available to me as a non-photography major was a photojournalism class. Once you took it for a grade you could repeat it as many times as you wanted to just for fun ~ which gave you access to the darkroom. Plus you got to work on assignment for the university newspaper. So I just kept on repeating it over and over :). I absolutely loved learning how to develop my own film, "push" process, recycle film canisters and roll my own film ... ahhh, those were the days.

Hope you are all enjoying the tour of my cameras. We'll wrap it up tomorrow with my venture into digital, which is where my passion exploded and I finally actually learned somethin'. I am a visual learner, after all. AND a post all about what's in my bag RIGHT NOW. Fun, fun, fun!

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