Thursday, August 6, 2009

Life in Analog

Long ago, in a place called college, I was all about the film. I sneered at digital cameras, and lugged around a delightfully sturdy old Minolta and a shiny little Colorsplash almost all the time. Those were good days, but at some point my sneering turned into curiosity, and I bought my first digital SLR: a little Canon Rebel XT, which was a pretty sweet camera in its day, and which I still use for the majority of my digital shots. But since then, I have always felt a nostalgia for my film days, when I spent hours scanning photos to upload them to my Lomography.com site, and worked in a CVS photolab to support my habit. Anyway, a couple of weekends ago, Brian and I found ourselves in an antique store in St. Joseph searching for vintage Penguin paperbacks, and there it was: a giant case of vintage cameras. I used to stop at thrift stores weekly to look for this kind of stuff, and would always ask antique dealers if they had any funny old cameras; I had a sweet Brownie Starflash, an old brick an Argus, and too many cheap plastic things to mention. Anyway, back to the present, a GIANT CASE of them, and the man who originally owned them at our disposal to tell us about them all. It was hard to pick just one, and in the end, I asked Brian if he would like one, too, (ha-ha!) and came home with the Mamiya/Sekor and the Zeiss Ikon. Anyway, the whole thing has gotten me excited about film again, (if not about the processing costs,) and I dusted off some of my old cameras and migrated my old Lomography account/home. Yay for film! I've missed you!

2 comments:

Colleen said...

The forth one is very close to my film camera! Actually it was my older brothers but i got to use it for my high school darkroom class last year! Definitely a favorite class of the year.

Amy said...

Nice!

Back in my college days - I majored in photography - there were no digital cameras... now I can't even imagine dealing with the processing. But I do miss the printing.