Throwback Thursday: My First Photography

My very first camera was a Kodak Trimlite 18 Pocket Instamatic 110 with a Flipflash. It came in a flat box with a Kodak-orange lid that flipped open to show the camera, flash, and a single roll of 110 film in a foam casing. The presentation was impressive to a young kid.

You could affix one of several customized stickers on the top, over the viewfinder, and I stuck the white one with the red Canadian maple leaf on it.

My parents gave me the camera for Christmas in 1975 (a few years before Operation: Christmas, or I would have known I was getting it before unwrapping it in front of my folks) but I don't have many images before the spring of 1976. In fact, I don't seem to have any images beyond what seems to be a single roll of film. All I have from that camera are only a few photos in a single paper envelope that I found while rummaging around my basement over the past Christmas holiday.

The camera was very small: as the name suggested, it easily fit into my back pocket, and I would carry it with me to school, especially if my class would go on a field trip and when I attended a bilingual exchange.

Ooh... that bilingual exchange brings bad memories. I'll share that another time.

The pictures include those of my friends from Century Public School, who I apparently captured in the school's playground. I have a couple of snaps of new friends at my next school, Chelsea Elementary, in Gatineau, some of my cousins, Keith and Kirk, in our house in Kirk's Ferry, and of that traumatic bilingual exchange student.

Someone (I don't remember who) took a picture of me. And before you laugh, remember: it was the 70s.
 

I have a couple of photos of the Museum of Nature (I think those Woolly Mammoths are gone) and of Québec City, where I stayed with my billet. And of the view of Ojai Road, where we lived, looking to the Brown Farm (not related) along Highway 105.

And that's it.

It seems that I remember carrying the camera around, I have some vague recollections of capturing images, but then it seems that when I finished my first roll of film, I didn't shoot another. Maybe I didn't like the quality of the images. Maybe my parents told me that if I wanted to take more photos, my 11-year-old self had to buy his own film.

(I doubt that, but I believe they may have asked me to earn the film through chores, and my lazy-assed-old self said no.)

Whatever the case, I'm glad I found these old photos, and I'm glad that my experience with that old 110-film camera inspired me to keep shooting.

Happy Thursday!