To all the cameras I've loved before || My life in Lists

A good friend of mine from high school recently asked me what kind of camera I'm using these days. He confessed that he had camera envy when I received my very first 35mm our senior year. I still have this camera, although it's broken. For fun, I took this picture of my Minolta X700 (see #3 below) and sent it to him.

It got me reminiscing about all the cameras I've had in my life. I hadn't really thought about their significance but I've had a love affair with each of them.  As I wrote this post, I remembered many others, but these are the main models that I remember distinctly.

1960's

1.  Mom's cameras - The Kodak Instamatic and the Kodak Prinz 110 Auto Pocket Camera (technically 1978). I remember these fondly, the odd shaped film canisters...the ice cube shaped flash.  These took many of my childhood photos incidentally, whose muted colors and soft focus are being replicated now in many different photo editing programs and apps.

1970's

2.  The Polaroid Electric Zip land the Polaroid Land Camera.  I loved the instant gratification these cameras gave.  I hated that I'd use up all of the film and not be able to get more right away because of the expense.  I was, after all, very (very, very) young then.

1980s

3.  My Minolta X700 35mm.  My dad got this for me my senior year in high school.  This is the camera that catapulted my love for photography. It was Minolta's top model in their final manual-focus SLR series before the introduction of the auto-focus Minolta Maxxum 700.   This was the camera that went with me on my senior trip to Colorado, to the Olympics in LA (Mary Lou Retton's year), and in many hours of photography classes.  This is the camera that my friend, Dan, envied.

1990's

4.  My first venture into digital cameras.  While my Canon Powershot sd500 was not the original or the only digital snappy I owned, it is the one I learned the most from in digital photography.  Most of my marriage and birth of my children were documented on digital.  In the beginning, I didn't want to stray from using film.  I fought it, but I eventually gave in and have loved it ever since.  The only downside being that I have files upon files of photos (many of which should be deleted) that I've not managed properly.  I guess it goes along with the boxes and boxes of photos and film I have stored away.  This Canon Powershot is also the one I used, initially, to take product shots for my website, blog, and business. 

2000

5.  My current camera is a Nikon D60.  It's a great camera that I'm slowly learning to use.  Nowadays, these cameras can do just about everything.  With the technology, however, comes a very steep learning curve.  One I'll be climbing for a long time.  I want to purchase many different lenses, and filters, and gadgets for this bad boy.  I'd love to to get to the point where I could actually tell you what I did to get a particular shot.  Right now, I'm running on luck.

Do you have a camera or cameras that you remember fondly?