and believe it or not, lots of people have told me that through the years! So here I am, writing.
This person also said I should be journaling. I find journaling to be difficult for one simple reason: it hurts my hand. HA...just kidding. It really does hurt my hand but mainly I usually can't think of anything "poetic" or "original" enough to commit it to my actual journal. "What really appears in my journal?"... you may ask? PICTURES. See, I used to be a scrapbooker....back about a hundred years or so. I've always been completely addicted to pictures....taking pictures, enlarging pictures, framing and displaying pictures, getting my picture taken (kidding again...too many pouty pics of me as a child out there to pull that one off). I got it from my mom apparently. Dorcas (yep, her real name) Borchers was always the one behind the camera when I was growing up, so I grew up with a camera in my face. Guess what? It's genetic. I did the same thing to my daughter, Spanky, and now she's doing it to HER daughter, Lincoln. Imagine.
So I take pictures. I take lots of pictures. My first camera was an "instamatic" Kodak brand. It used a cassette kind of film thingy. I have every picture (or negative of every picture) that I've ever taken. Much to my husband's dismay, for sure....plenty of stuff already in the garage, plus those pesky boxes of negatives.
My photos number in the thousands now that my mom is gone and I inherited all of her pictures as well. One terrible thing happened in her past that would impact all of this. Their little shack of a house in Harlan, Kentucky burned down. Who knows how many precious photos and bits of history were destroyed. Mother never said. She would only this when I asked about older pictures, "It all burned up in the fire." So sad, right?
Watching Mother go through her different photographic stages through the years was fun and interesting. She was actually one of those people who owned a Kodak "Disc" camera. They were a short lived dinosaur kind of camera. The negatives looked like one of those ViewMaster disks. In fact, I'm sure that's where the idea came from. She never kept those negatives, which is a shame. It'd be fun to see them now. When I was small, she had the old Brownie cube camera with the huge flash attachment with bulbs. Man, I can still see the dots from those flash bulbs.
But I digress. My Instamatic gave way to the old Polaroid which evolved into an actual cheap but effective 35mm (Yashica, I think). In my early 20's I was on a canoe trip and dropped that camera in the water. Never took a camera near water again without protecting it. I replaced that one with another, and I kept that for a few years, until I finally splurged on a "real" 35mm, with the old bayonet lenses. I got some awesome pics from that camera. Then, along came the "mini 35" cameras. Oh man, did I want one of those. I went to a lot of rock concerts and I wanted a camera (imagine this) that I could just slip into my pocket. (This was before they started physically searching people at the concert venue.) I saved up and got one but it was never good enough for me. They were basically stripped down models back then, no real settings to speak of....the original "point-and-shoot" camera. I kept on, though. I loved the point-and-shoot, and I got tons of great pics from them. I must have had 5 or 6 of them through the years. (They improved of course, and they were good enough for me.) I even transitioned into the weird camera they called the "APS" (Advanced Photo System). This was the camera that you could take a "regular" 35mm pic or a "panoramic" formatted one. Crazy camera. It cut the top and bottom out of the frame and voila! you had yourself a "genuine" panoramic picture. In all honesty, I do have some pretty awesome pics from that style camera. I think I had two of them. One small one, and the second a larger one with an extra long optical zoom lens capability. The second was an actual APS SLR. I just read on Wikipedia that they weren't taken "seriously". LOL Still I got some great pics from them both. That was back in the mid 90's.
Then....along came digital. The age of instant gratification. My first digital camera was a 2.1 megapixel. Hard to imagine, right? My PHONE has a better camera than that, at 5.0 MP!! And the rest is history. I've always tried to have the most powerful optical zoom I could afford on a camera and that hasn't changed. And now I'm wondering how this turned into an article about old cameras, when what I sat out to do was "write." Oh well......
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