That’s me, with my first toy camera!

Today, June 29, is #NationalCameraDay! There could not be a more perfect day for me to tell you a little about my history with cameras.

I was always intrigued with cameras. When I was little, I had a plastic camera made by Fisher Price and I would go around taking pretend pictures of everything. At some point, I was allowed to hold my dad’s real camera, The photos of me and my sister from the mid-1970s, that’s the camera!

When I was 7, my aunt “Auntie Anne” bought me my first camera. It was a Kodak Instamatic, which took a film cartridge. In the photo, my niece is holding that camera. They stopped making that type of film, 126, a long time ago. It produced square negatives/prints. I used to have to purchase a flash cube or a flash bar for it.

When I was a teen, I had a similar camera, but it took 110 cartridge film! The size of the negative was very tiny, about the size of my thumbprint. Needless to say, it didn’t produce very clear images. But it did have a built-in flash!

When I went off to college, I signed up for photography classes and bought my first “good” camera, a 35mm Canon AE-1. I bought it used from a camera store in Deerfield Beach, Florida. I

got a lens or two with it and spent around $200 for the whole setup. I spent hours upon hours in the darkroom on campus playing around, developing and printing my own black and white film and photos.

Around the same time, I started working in a one-hour photo. That was super fun, and I got a great discount on developing.

At this age, I was allowed to handle my father’s camera.

After college, I began working in a camera store that also had a one-hour photo. We received a ton of training in photography. I remember there were social events put on by the camera manufacturers where you could borrow and try out all the best stuff. On Nikon Day at the Zoo, I tried out some great equipment, and Nikon became a goal for me.

During the holidays, the camera store chain and its partners had great offers for employees. I opted to get my first autofocus camera around 1995. I chose Minolta. But I wore the motor drive out before the warranty expired, and I switched to Nikon at the first opportunity I could.

The first digital camera I used was one my students and I borrowed from our yearbook sales rep, Steven. It was a Kodak, and this was so early in the digital game that it did not have a storage card. It simply took about 30 photos

before it was “full” and we would have to download, erase and start over. We used it to take lots of photos quickly so we could do a photo collage on the yearbook cover in 2000.

The next digital cameras were Nikons which our class got as part of a grant from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. They were 2 and 3 megapixels. That was a big deal! These cameras

My niece Samantha is holding the camera I got for my First Communion from my Aunt Anne.

produced the first full size printed images in our yearbooks in 2003.

Around this time, Nikon released its first digital SLRs and I got myself a Nikon D100. It is possible that this camera is still working. It was a great camera, and it took my old Nikon film lenses, what a great thing!

Over the years, many more Nikon DSLRs passed through my hands. You can see a lot of them around my neck in the one photo, which was taken after a school pep rally. The pep rallies always happened at the end of the day, so when they ended, the yearbook staff would find me and hand in their cameras and I would bring them back to the classroom to secure them over the weekend.

I am still a Nikon Girl. Now we have a combination of two full frame mirrorless Nikons, and several DSLRs. I like to have a couple of different lens options when I am outshooting, and I prefer not to change lenses out in the field where I can get dirt and dust in my camera. So the full frame cameras take the bulk of our photos, but we have the others for specialty things, such as close-ups (we have a micro lens) and super wide stuff (we have a 10-20 wide angle lens).

Now that we have gotten used to using them, these new cameras are game changers. So fast and sharp! We are still trying to get used to the fact that the camera does not need to be up to our eye, lol. I am starting to get there with that…

I could say a lot more about cameras, like which lenses are my favorites, and what I would do if I could just have one, but I think I have written enough, so I will leave that for another day!

After a pep rally in 2016. The yearbook staff would all return their cameras to me before running to catch their busses home.

Happy National Camera Day! What’s your favorite camera memory?