Say cheese, a camera journey ....

Did you know I have an obsession with cameras? I own 13 of them, really. Not sure if 10 of them work ... but people find them for me and give them to me - I have one as old at the 1930's, but most are around 40 - 50 years old. Besides dogs, and parking tickets, it is the only thing I collect :)

This is where it all started ...

My old school Pentax K1000 is such a wicked camera. I held this camera for the first time when I was 7, it was my mom's at the time. I still have the very first photo I ever took with it - from the window of a train while we were going through Roger's Pass in B.C., on our way to east moving to Toronto. Sure the photo is blurry, but come on I was 7, and we were on a train!!

This camera stayed in use with me until I was 21. It went through 3 years of high school photography - I don't even know how many rolls of film I developed in that dingy darkroom. It went though 4 years of College photography classes and an Independent study for my graduation, again a countless amount of film developed in the darkroom. I bought a clunky old zoom lens for it and a flash too make it more fancy. Then I purchased a NEW Pentax SLR when I graduated College, but still I liked my K1000 better!!

Did I mention I used the K1000 for 10 years with a broken light meter? It's a miracle I got some of the photos I did, but a lot of trial and error made us a good team for all those years. I am going to shoot some film in the next couple of weeks - I am super excited, so I have been reminiscing about this camera, wow we have done a lot together, and I learned so much from this 'old tank'. I was such a film die hard, I remember resisting getting my first DSLR Pentax. Now onto my second DSLR I love it, and I converted to Nikon, but there is something about the surprise of not being able to see a photo before it is developed that I still miss.

They don't make 'em like they used too ...

One time I was at the Fair in about grade 11, and i took it on the "Rock N Roll", a ride that spins you upside down, well my camera came off from around my neck, fell on to the metal platform, then bounced off and fell another 4 feet onto the cement. did it break? NOPE. Would my camera I have now bust into 1000 pieces, most likely! 

Sweet baby Jane taken with the original, K1000, in 1999.

Kaleb taken with the NEW Pentax film SLR in 2002 (I bought in'99)

Gyp taken with my first Pentax (Digital) DSLR, in 2007 (I bought it in '04)

Jane almost 10 years old, taken with my Nikon D300.