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!
I got my first camera for Christmas, in 1975. I was 11, and point-and-shoot pocket cameras were the rage. It was a Kodak Trimline Instamatic 18: a 110-format camera with clip-in, desposable flash—eight shots and it was done.
My camera came with stickers, which fit into a textured recess on the top, just above the viewfinder. I chose a stylized Canadian flag—a red maple leaf on a white background and a touch of red at one edge.
It was my first foray into photography.
With my Instamatic, I shot family events, like birthdays and holidays. I shot friends at school. In grade 6, I took my camera with me, when I participated in a bilingual exchange in Québec City. I shot up Chateau Frontenac, the Citadel, and Montmorency Falls.
The photos weren't great: the colours were muted, the images weren't sharp, and you could never enlarge a shot to anything bigger than a 4 x 6, lest the grain show. But it was easy to use: insert the cartridge, crank, shoot, crank, shoot... when you were done you opened the back and took the cartrige out. It was foolproof.
But my family had a collection of Time-Life books on photography, and I wanted to take pictures that looked like the ones on those pages. My father had a real camera, a Minolta SR T-101, and I wanted to learn how to use it.
I loved that camera. It had a 55mm f/1.2 lens that produced super-clear images. The split-circle in the viewfinder made for quick focusing. All you had to do was line up the image in the top-half of the circle with the bottom half, and you had a sharp image. For the exposure meter, you had a bar that would move up and down with the amount of light that passed through the lens. An arm with a loop at its end moved up and down when you turned the aperture ring or the shutter-speed dial. When the light bar was inside the loop, the exposure was balanced.
There were no program modes on this camera. It was completely manual.
My father let me borrow it from time to time, when I was in high school. My best friend, Stuart, was also into photography, as was his dad, and we would shoot black-and-white film, and develop it in a makeshift dark room in his family's basement. In the last few years of high school, Stu and I joined the yearbook team as photographers, and we would use the school dark room as well. Many of our senior yearbook photos were shot by us or by another photog, Sandy.
My father's SR T-101 got a lot more use in those years than it had in all the years that he had owned it (he still owns it but I doubt it's seen action in decades).
When I went to college and took the journalism program, my father thought it was time for me to have an SLR of my own, and so we went shopping at our local Black's Cameras. The manager knew me, because I worked in the same shopping mall, and he sold me a great package: it was a Minolta X-700 with a 28-75mm zoom lens. I could still attach my father's lens to it, but this camera was far more advanced than his old body.
My X-700 still had the same focus screen, was still a manual-focus camera, but it also had an aperture-priority setting and a fully automatic exposure mode. Instead of the arm-loop exposure meter, this metering used lights. I didn't find the lights faster than the metering system on the SR T-101, but there were lots more features than the fully manual camera I had used to learn the basics of photography.
My X-700 travelled many places with me. It has been to the United States, Mexico, the UK, Holland, Germany, Italy, South and North Korea, China, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. It has shot weddings, countless birthdays and parties; it has shot the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China.
I used that camera from 1985 to 2008, and pulled it out a couple of times since (it was on my lap as I wrote this post). I loved that camera. I still do.
For Christmas in 2008, I joined the D-SLR club with my D80. Minolta was gone, having lost out on the digital photography market and being swallowed up by Sony. With Canon and Nikon as the top D-SLR manufacturers, it took me many months of reading reviews, comparing specs, and price hunting before I finally went with Nikon. I came so close to going with Canon.
And now, as we finish 2014, I am finding that digital photography, while it has many advantages over 35mm photography, there is one major setback. In the digital age, nothing lasts forever. My camera has had its motherboard replaced, its card reader replaced, and now its sensor seems to be wearing. Night shots produce lots of digital noise. In 2015, I will be looking at replacing my camera, upgrading to a better model.
Or perhaps I'll return to the simpler days, to my X-700, or even further back, looking to borrow my father's SR T-101.
The days of the Kodak Instamatic are long gone, thank goodness, but 35mm lives on.
For now.
Thanks to Scott Oakley for giving me the idea for this blog post.
