For my own amusement I am writing a memoir about my cameras and my associated photography since I was a child. You’re welcome to join my journey. As you’ll see I’ve had a lifelong fascination with photography and cameras.
The first camera I recollect owning was a birthday gift from my parents when I was around 10 or 11 years old or so. Sadly none of the photographs taken with this camera are in my possession. I don’t think I shot a lot of images with it, primarily because film and processing was expensive and my family did not have the money to indulge large scale use of the camera. On the other hand, I do remember two very clear instances of using the camera.
My junior high school in Gastonia, NC routinely took all 8th graders on a day long field trip to Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, NC. I brought the camera long and shot a roll or two. Mostly, I shot the sites along the way like the NC Penitentiary where I saw the gas chamber used to execute the condemned, the old Dorton Arena, which was considered a regional architectural wonder, and finally the campus of the University of North Carolina. I thought I did a pretty good job documenting the trip, but when I showed the developed photos to my mother, she was apoplectic because none of the photos included my trip companions. She really dressed me down for this failure, and it actually affected my photography for a long time afterwards. Ahhhh, the damage that parents can do to their children… I call it my mom’s curse and I labored under it for a long, long time.
Photo by Don O’Brien via Wikimedia Commons
In the 8th grade, at my Junior High School, a photography class was offered by the shop teacher, Mr. Cloninger. The focus of the class was the technology of film development and processing in the school’s iconic basement darkroom, which, as they all were, was buried near the Balrog’s lair down in the bowels of the earth. For class, we were all instructed to purchase film developer, fixer and photo paper. My parents were good enough to fund the experience.
I had no fancy film developer device. Instead in the pitch dark of my home’s bathroom, with towels stuffed under the door, and using two cake pans for the chemicals, I developed the film taken from the Brownie with the help of my Mom timing the process, as I sloshed the film back and forth, first in the chemical developer and then finally the fixer. It was pretty rudimentary but actually worked quite well. I’d then take the film to the dark room and print the images. Sadly, none of those photos exist today, but the class created lifetime memories! I have no memory of what happened to that camera.
I recollect being gifted with a Kodak Instamatic camera in my early teens from my parents. Back in those days of the early/mid 1960’s Kodak heavily advertised their simple Instamatic cameras. They were relatively inexpensive mass produced devices that were perfect for producing family memories. The film was encased in a hard plastic container that made loading into the camera very easy with little chance of accidentally exposing it. I remember thinking that if I wanted to develop the film, getting into that plastic enclosure would be very difficult. The film was a very small format 110 size which offered the user limited image size and resolution but they were great for photo albums. I do not think I used this camera very often except on family outings and have no examples of the images taken, though I can remember some of them like the ones taken on a family trip to Tweetsie Railroad in the North Carolina mountains. Again, I think the cost of purchasing and developing the film was a prohibitive factor.
After Junior High School, I had little to do with cameras or photography, and this dwell period lasted until I finished undergraduate school. It is important to note that one of my fraternity brothers, John Gellman, was as avid photographer and happened to be on staff of the Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina. He could be seen everywhere with a Nikon 35mm camera around his neck. The photo to the right is one he took of me in the backyard of our frat house in Chapel Hill. In short, I was inspired by John’s photography and thought I would like to be a 35mm shooter some time in the future.
I got my first taste of actual 35mm film photography in graduate school at the Institute of Textile Technology (1978), where there was a Canon manual 35mm camera available on loan. I shot a couple of roles of film and was, in short, quite enthused. The camera had a normal 50mm lens and an onboard, in camera TTL (through the lens) light meter. It was up to the shooter to select f/stop, shutter speed and film ASA(light sensitivity) to get the proper exposure. After that experience, I committed to purchasing a 35mm film camera when I could afford one. I really liked the feeling of peering into the view finder and capturing the image with a click of the shutter button.
After graduate school, I took my first post as a technical manager in Tallassee, Alabama at a very large textile manufacturing complex. It was during my time in Alabama that I purchased my first 35mm Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera. It was the popular Canon AE-1.
For its time, the AE-1 was a breakthrough camera. Because of advanced design and manufacturing techniques, the camera was reasonably affordable for the technology it had to offer the user. It was one of the first SLR’s that had through the lens exposure metering which allowed precise exposure of the subject by automatically adjusting the aperture. This approach was referred to as shutter-speed priority. In other words, the user controlled shutter speed and the aperture automatically stopped down to the appropriate f/stop as determined by the TTL exposure meter. The basic out of the box AE-1 came with a relatively fast f/1.8, 50mm lens. Later, I purchased a Tokina 105mm lens to serve as a modest telephoto lens.
Still suffering under my mother’s curse, the preponderance of images I shot with the AE-1 were family photographs. I don’t have many of the photos from that era as they got lost in the shuffle of life. The image below is a great example of the AE-1’s ability. It must have been taken by my wife, at the time, after I set the camera up for her. It demonstrates how the camera was used to document family activity. It’s me in my younger days with my first born, Jessica:
With the AE-1, I shot a lot of 400 ASA film, which was a fast (good in lower light) and popular film for the time, but I eventually gravitated to 100 ASA because it was less grainy. I think I also experimented with a few rolls of slide film to save some cost in film processing, but found it unsatisfying squinting through a viewer to see the images. Though I enjoyed photography, I was irked at the cost of film processing and lack of control over the final product, so it limited how much experimentation I would do. In a single 24 picture roll of film, I would typically have a handful of keepers, so film photography was not a very shooter and cost efficient enterprise. For more process control, I considered purchasing a dark room set-up but ruled that out because I did not have the physical space and I preferred color photography. A color dark room was completely out of the question because of its increased complexity and cost.
The AE-1 was a fun camera to use and very popular, as evidenced by the advertisement shown above. I used the camera for several years before becoming distracted by changing jobs and later beginning work on a doctorate at the University of Virginia.
It was in the late 1980’s that I was on a business trip to New Orleans, where I was attending the annual meeting of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which accredited the institution where I was dean of the graduate program. Between sessions there was plenty of time to walk around the commercial district. I was astonished by the number of camera shops on the main drag. In retrospect, I suspect that many of those stores were owned by a single company. Nevertheless, I visited several of the shops and in doing so, I became aware of technical advances in consumer SLR cameras that had been made since I’d purchased the Canon AE-1. Most notably, the Minolta SLR that I scrutinized in the store had a state-of-the-art autofocus system, a motor-assisted zoom barrel, and selectable aperture or shutter speed priority. Further, there was a program mode where the camera could make all the decisions itself, which was great if you were feeling lazy while snapping off some quick shots. Motivated by the new technology, I purchased a Minolta in New Orleans and used it through the 1990’s. It was a fine camera to use during the waning days of film photography. As with the Canon AE-1, most of my film photographs were for family documentation. Similar to the AE_1, prohibiting factors were film and processing costs, and the lack of control over the final product since outside processors still developed and printed the film.
Below, you can see a scan of a shot taken with my Minolta of Nettie and four of our five kids on our honeymoon trip to Lake Superior,
When I took a post at the University of Northern Iowa as a Professor of Textiles and Apparel in 1999, one of my first tasks, outside of teaching and research, was to support the annual student design show. I was loaned a small digital point and shoot camera to photograph the show. No one had ever photographed the show before me. The camera was about the size of a cassette tape, easy to use, was magical in how quickly it rendered an image to be seen on its rear LCD screen after the shot. On the other hand, the camera suffered from serious shutter lag, which was very disconcerting at first because I never experienced that phenomenon. Shutter lag meant the camera did not actually take the shot for some time after pressing the shutter, so that what you saw produced on the LCD panel was different from what you saw when you activated the shutter. Latter digital cameras removed the lag. Despite the shutter lag, I was beguiled by this new technology.
Shortly thereafter, I prevailed upon my department to order a digital camera for our use, which ended up being occupied primarily by me, mostly because I was the only who cared about photography. It was an early generation 2.1 megapixel Kodak DC265 digital range finder. I used it extensively for several years to document activity in my department and also to support my field research, which at the time was to study Civil War Reenacting, its meaning, and the relationship of dress and appearance to the activity.
You can see below a photograph of a national reenactment that I shot with the Kodak in the early 2000’s. The image was subsequently published in a monthly Civil War Reenactment journal, called the Camp Chase Gazette. This version was post processed to look like a painting.
The Kodak digital camera was a true workhorse out in the field. It was exceptionally durable and its NiCad batteries held charge long enough to make it through a multi-day reenactment. It knocked out 8×10 inch images without difficulty, though that was about its maximum resolution limit, and the color rendering was reasonably accurate. Digital photo post-processing was pretty rudimentary in those days; however, I did manage to isolate my image from one photograph, and then cut and paste it onto a Matthew Brady original of captured Confederates at Gettysburg. I did this for a presentation at a professional meeting. See below:
I dabbled around with my university’s digital cameras for several years, including a later upgrade to the Kodak. My department purchased a 5.1 megapixel, Nikon Coolpix E5000. It was a step up from the Kodak in that it had a host of more advanced features and was thus considered a prosumer camera. I had access to the camera from around 2003 to 2005. It was used to document department activities, and I shot some personal photos too like the one below that was taken on the shore of Lake Superior in Wisconsin:
Around the spring of 2005, I stumbled upon a news article reviewing the new Nikon D70s. I was astonished because I had no idea that SLR’s were being manufactured that replaced film with digital sensors. They were referred to as DSLR’s. Further, my wife and I were going to spend 5 weeks in Lyon, France with our family teaching textile history at a museum and I wanted to document the trip with photography. I decided it was time to jump in and get a new camera of my own. For quite some time I was very interested in acquiring a Nikon camera, as that’s what my frat brother John Gellman shot when we were both at the University of North Carolina.
So, on a visit to Iowa City in May 2005 to see our daughter who was in school at the University of Iowa, I stopped by the local camera shop in the downtown area. The shop did not have the highly demanded D70s, but had an older stock D70, and I jumped all over it. Most exciting was that this was a real SLR camera but with a digital sensor replacing film! I suspect that the camera shop charged me top dollar, but I was delighted to leave town with the Nikon in my possession. The kit contained an 18-70mm zoom autofocus lens with a 6.1 megapixel sensor, which was larger in comparison to the university point and shoots I was using. The sensor was DX sized, which meant it was smaller than the size of a piece of 35mm film; nevertheless, it was a very capable “relatively” affordable consumer DSLR and I loved it the moment I heard the shutter click the first time.
Unlike the digital point and shoots, where the photos unloaded from the camera were pretty much ready to go, the D70 RAW files were anything but ready. I was shocked to see how dull and lifeless they looked like until they were post-processed on my computer to bring out the brilliance of the camera’s capture. To get the best post processing that I could at the time, I adopted Apple’s Aperture software, which I used religiously through every update, until Apple dropped the photo post-processing business. I later adopted, somewhat reluctantly, Adobe Lightroom and use it still today as I write.
I also found myself shaking off my mother’s curse and started making images for art’s sake. I felt liberated by the ability to instantly see the results of my photography and to subsequently fine tune the final product using Apple Aperture. Shortly after purchasing the D70, I took off for Lyon, France with the Nikon as well as a MacBook, and had a wonderful time using the D70 every day. Below you can see a depth of field perspective shot that I made while visiting a French Chateau. I was inspired by a similar shot I’d seen in my thumbed through classic Handbook of Photography!
Inspired too by a photograph of Coco Chanel on a scooter that I’d seen in my wife’s office, I created a derivative shot of our son Parker with his sister Madeline.
A couple of years after owning the D70, I became interested in the Nikon D200 as a step-up camera. It was an interesting time in DSLR development with companies rapidly developing advancements in sensor size, sensor light sensitivity, camera build and operating features. In short, it was a golden age of camera development. Camera companies like Nikon and Canon put out a lot of marketing pressure to make photographers feel left behind if they did not get on board with the latest models! I was not immune to these tactics.
What attracted me about the D200 was its pro-build. Unlike the D70, the body was not plastic but instead was built upon a magnesium skeleton. There were control features the D200 possessed like the ability to do back-button focusing that were not available on the D70. Further, the sensor megapixels rose to 10.1 versus 6.1, which would be visibly different in the image, allowing for more cropping and greater enlargements. I gave the D70 to my daughter Sally and purchased a D200. It made me feel like a pro of sorts.
With the D200, I continued to try to raise the level of my photography beyond simple family snapshots, though I still made plenty of them.
The Nikon D300’s imaging technology was considered an evolutionary step beyond its predecessor the D200. The D300 offered an increase in megapixels from 10 to 12, which may have not been visibly noticeable; however, the D300 had better color rendering, better highlights, better shadows, enhanced autofocus and far better battery life. By the opinion of most reviewers, it made the D200 technologically obsolete. Sadly, the D300 arrived just shortly after I purchased the D200, and Nikon’s marketing machine beat me into submission. As a result, I sold the D200 to an associate at my university and purchased a D300!
As I wrote earlier, the middle late 2000’s was a period of rapid development in digital sensor and data processing technology. Photographers like myself suffered from fear of missing out (FOMO) and were easy prey for corporate marketing strategies. I don’t regret dumping the D200 so quickly, but I probably could have saved money and taken photos with it just fine for several more years. Moving from model to upgraded model was the state of the hobby back then. In the end, my experience with the D300 was that it was an excellent and versatile pro-level camera. I took a lot of excellent photographs with it.
Many of the photos I shot were of everyday quotidian life, but I continued to push myself to add a level of artistic expression to the images. The D300’s rapid shutter speed, color rendering, and improved low light sensitivity let me push my photographic boundaries a bit further beyond my previous cameras. It was a ruggedly built device too, so I took everywhere when travelling.
As with all the other Nikons that I owned, the D300’s sensor was a DX size, which meant that it was measurably smaller than the size of 35mm film, which the original film SLR’s used. The DX size limited the field of view that could be capture and required lenses to be multiplied by a factor of 1.5 to accurately express the true focal length.
As I recollect, at the same time that the D300 was introduced, Nikon also began selling a model designated the D700. Though its external appearance was very similar to the D300, internally it contained an FX sized sensor, which was the size of 35mm film. What this means is that DX has about 60% of the surface area as compared to an FX sensor. The FX was commonly referred to as a full frame sensor. At that time, in the middle-late 2000’s there was a good deal of discussion about the merits of FX vs DX sensor technology. Many hardcore photographers believed FX full frame was the only way to go because it best replicated the “film experience.”
Both the Nikon D300 and the D700 had 12.1 megapixel sensors; however, because of the size advantage of the D700’s more expansive FX sensor, its pixels were comparatively larger. If you consider that a pixel is a light capturing bucket, then the D700’s are considerably larger than the D300’s, permitting it to capture more light, which in turn allows it to be much more effective in low light situations, and also to capture more data from an exposure yielding more color richness and image detail.
I shot with the D300 for several years and was delighted with its performance; however, after exposure to consistent praise for the D700 during those same years, I eventually opted to purchase a used one from eBay. In short the D700 was, in my opinion, a breakthrough piece of technology. I now consider it a classic camera. The images it created were magical. Combined with the acquisition of a Nikkor 105mm macro lens, the D700 opened a broad new vista of artistic creativity for me. I was functioning at a higher level than ever before.
Note: the D700 is now in my son Parker’s hands and still functions beautifully. As I said, it is a classic camera. On the other hand, the D300 shutter quit functioning, which was a disappointment. It may have been repairable, but I thought that would be throwing good money after bad as I’d moved away from DX sensor photography.
In the summer of 2014, Nikon announced a new flagship model called the D810. It was a major enhancement beyond the magical D700. The D810 was such a quantum leap in technological advancement it raised questions among D700 shooters as to whether it was time to upgrade.
For photographers who dislike using flash like me, the D810 was capable of working in lower light than any other Nikon. More importantly, the sensor resolution leapt from the D700’s 12.1 megapixel up to the D810’s 36 megapixel, thus the camera with its FX sized sensor was capable of grabbing huge amounts of detail for an image. In fact, for me it would require a computer upgrade to handle the files efficiently. There were other enhancements like enhanced LCD resolution and improved autofocus too.
Reviewers at the time haled the D810 as “the best” professional camera available, so I ordered one and handed the D700 down to my son, who has used it to good effect. I’ve used the D810 for the past 9 years with little thought to upgrading because it never limited my creativity and often resulted in amazing photographs.
Along the way, I built a conserable support kit for the D810, including a pro tripod, monopod, state-of-the-art ball heads, multiple lenses, including two for macro shooting, a standard top mount flash, and a lens mount flash. Here are some example shots made with the D810:
Just this spring 2024 I purchased a new camera, which has offered me a fantastic experience as a photographer. The background story on my purchase can be found on this weblog here. Below are examples of some of the images I’ve taken with the Leica thus far.
