A ridiculously long narrative intended to entertain and inform
I’ve been around a while and used a lot of different gear. I’ve also seen the photo market go through a lot of changes. Including the disruptive transition from film to digital.
I’ve always been a ‘camera geek’ and wanna-be camera collector. ShutterBug magazines were never far from hand and then there is eBay.
At age 10, my 1st camera was a Kodak Brownie. A simple box camera.
I still have black & white prints of the shots I took with it of the Good Friday Earthquake of 1964. In my late teens, I scored a used Olympus Pen FT (1/2-frame 35mm porro-prism) with 3 lenses. It was tiny. I carried everything I needed in a old gas mask bag I dyed black with a guitar strap attached. It went everywhere I went.
I once had a Pen FT lens roll off my lap, into the Russian River on the Kenai in Alaska.
We were hiking into 12 Mile lake when it happened. I fished it out and rinsed it off with drinking water. After returning to Anchorage, I was able to get it cleaned and new iris diagram blades installed.
The Pen FT is a coveted collectors camera today. Wish I still had it.
Once I was working full time as a journeyman lithographer, I bought a brand new Nikon F2 Photomic with 3 lenses (a 24mm, 35mm and 85mm). That was a chunk of change, even back then. I loved the F2, but it was a heavy piece of brass… you could hammer small nails with it. I used the Nikon for about 5 years shooting B&W before jumping into the Olympus OM system in a big way– 4 bodies (2 OM-1, 2 OM- 2), 2 complete motor-drive sets with grips and 13 prime Zuiko lenses, no zooms in the bunch. I also got the macro bellows set for it. It was the first time I got to play with a fisheye lens. All of it mail-order from Hong Kong.
I split all the Olympus OM gear into two travel sets, minus the macro bellows and 300mm F4.5.
I made the switch to OM because it was so much smaller and lighter… A big deal when you tromp through the woods of Alaska or cross-country ski.
Medium format was next– a new Mamiya RB67 proS with 2 lenses, a 65mm and 127mm (also from Hong Kong) for studio work. I took it with me on my first trip to Hawaii, but it was just too heavy to drag around. I think I put 3 rolls through it, the whole time I was there.
Instead, I put 60 rolls of Kodachrome through my OM gear, in 9 days.
Later on, I acquired several 4×5 view cameras. I had two ‘favs’, a Horseman monorail with ‘L’ bracket standards for in the studio and a mint condition Crown Graphic with a classic 90mm Super Angulon for field work. Shot a lot of fireworks with that one. 
Those are the cameras you see press photographers using with flash bulbs from movies made in the 1940’s. I eventually sold all the 4×5 stuff to buy my first Mac computer, a Centris 660AV with 19″ Trinitron display so I could work in Photoshop.
I also got to briefly shoot with a Bronica 6x6cm, medium format camera… it took crisp images. There are reasons why some pros preferred the square format. I was never fond of ‘square’. I prefer to decide on composition when I take the shot… not rely on cropping later.
I never owned a Leica or Hasselblad…
they were too rich for my blood.
Today, I still shoot a little 120 rollfilm… I own a Fuji GSW 690 III rangefinder with 65mm wide angle lens for night-time shots. The lens is extremely crisp, even wide open at F5.6. What’s more, though it’s big and bulky, it is made of polycarbonate plastic so it’s very light weight. It is strictly manual. No electronics whatsoever. That’s what spot meters are for.
The Birth of Digital Photography.. I was there
My first ‘hands-on’ experience with digital imaging was with an Apple QuickTake 150 I borrowed from a dealer and quickly gave back. It was a joke. As was the first Sony Mavica I tried. The Sony was simply a ‘hi-def’ video camera that only shot stills and cost a grand, though it had these cute little proprietary floppy disks.
Those were the early days of Digital Photography.
I paid $700 for my first ‘real’ digital camera.. a Nikon Coolpix 990 at 3MP. I loved it, took tons of photos with it before moving up to an Olympus C8080 at 8MP. The Olympus had a very good zoom lens (bordering on exceptional). Just not wide enough for my tastes. I used it steady for about 3 years.
98% of my Puerto Rican travel blog was shot with a Sony A100 (12MP) SLR with 3 AF zoom lenses. It was the first digital SLR Sony produced after buying out the Konica/Minolta camera division. As with many of the early D/SLRs, its low-light capability was trash… anything over 400 ISO was worthless. In daylight or dusk, no problem. I learned to squeeze out every bit of detail and color via Photoshop. The lens makes all the difference in the world, but I want to save that for another post. As important as the camera might be, the lens is more so.
In June of 2012, I scored a Sony NEX-7. I’ll be writing about it in more detail, soon.
WOW…
The above was not an exercise in name dropping. I simply wanted you to know, I know a little something about cameras and photo gear. My opinions are based on many years of personal experience and study. I think of cameras as small marvels of human ingenuity and engineering. I love cameras.. all my friends would tell you so.
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