The first decent camera I had was bought from Dixon’s in the UK some 20+ years ago. I forget the make, but it was a pretty good SLR that came with a great little lens. The pictures I took are still clear and bright… and obviously it used 35 mm film. It got damaged a long time back when the flash mount was snapped off. To replace it I bought a Ricoh ‘all in one’. The lens was an integral part of the camera, i.e. the entire thing was one integrated unit. This was the first auto-focus camera I had… well it was automatic everything actually if you wanted it to be… but settings could be adjusted manually if you wished. That camera was also pretty good, if bulky… and used 35 mm film.
That camera served us well and remained our primary source of photos for around 10 years producing innumerable shots which we treasure today! We took it around Europe with us on the last holiday we had before migrating and of the thousand or so pictures it took, there were only a few (literally) that were unclear or out of focus. Just before we went back to the UK last time, some 5 years now, we bought our first ‘digital’ camera, a Canon ‘something or other’… the model as usual escapes me. This thing had a 10x zoom and a 3 mp lens and I thought it was fantastic! I took *thousands* of pictures of everything and anything I could see.
Sadly unlike the ongoing record of our lives we maintained with the 35 mm film cameras, almost *all* those snaps disappeared when the hard drive I was using to back up the photos got damaged at the same time as I wiped the original disk in order to reformat it. One day I hope I’ll find a company that can recover the disc contents… but so far they are just sitting, and waiting.
Anyway, I digress. The camera for good or ill served us well producing thousands of good quality snaps and storing memories of places and people we’d otherwise have problems remembering.
All well and good I hear you say… but so what? Well the point is… I’ve lost it. I think I finally have to accept the fact that it’s gone. Gone where… I have *no* idea. I’ve looked through almost all the boxes of rubbish I’ve accumulated over the years and so far there’s no sign of it anywhere and I’m rapidly running out of places to look.
Much as this will get the wife’s back up… I’m really going to have to consider buying a new one! I’ve been wittering on for a while about small cameras and suggesting I get one… but that was more of a suggestion for potential birthday or Xmas presents than any serious request. Now though I think the situation is changing. If I can’t locate the thing we’re going to miss out on a lot of memories we’d otherwise have kept.
It might be getting close to the time we have to bite the bullet and just go for it.
The Eclectic Interweb 