Love affair with Photography: part 1

Cameras are important to me; photography has been an important part of my life and a lifelong hobby.

I remember my first camera I bought when I was in grade school, it was all plastic, in a plastic bag and cost exactly $1.00. It was a 120 roll film camera and I still have some of the photos I took. Next, was a Kodak Instamatic I received for Christmas, with the flash cubes, and I went on through the Polaroids, 35 mm SLR’s, my own darkroom, and into the present digitals. Right now I have approximately ten cameras (more or less), although I usually only use three or four of them.

Through the years I have in my opinion taken some pretty darn good photos. Some people have suggested I should do it for a living but that hasn’t really lured me yet and the more I learn about the professional aspects of photography the more I wonder if I would like it as a job. I think sometimes things you love doing as a hobby like fly fishing, when turned into the drudgery of daily income generation, somehow filters out the joy. I have worked things like weddings, and taking pictures of people’s children, and there is the pressure of not capturing the “most important moment” of someone’s life.

Digital cameras really rock, they have solved the biggest problem and expense of photography…dealing with film. Film isn’t just very expensive, it is also hard to deal with in comparison, and time consuming, and lastly it uses dangerous and polluting chemicals. I used to “bracket” exposures because if you had an important shot, or something that you really wanted to capture, then it was important to get the exposure down. Oftentimes it was unclear what you would really end up with. Now bracketing is cheap and easy, and mistakes can just be deleted. In addition, programs like Photoshop can be used to edit and do the “darkroom” stuff on photos.
So now a person can just shoot and shoot and it costs virtually nothing. There is some talk about what the ethics of photography currently are as far as what is the original image, and what is altered and changed digitally. Edward Weston used to feel there should be no image manipulation at all, even enlargement, and he contact printed his 8”x12” negatives with a lightbulb in his little shack in Carmel.

There are currently so many ways to manipulate digital images it is very hard to tell what is original and real, and what is not.

But images in general are easier than ever to record. Many cameras now are weatherproof and even water pressure proof for very inexpensive prices. The options are endless for today’s photographers. People today can even use film if they really want to be old school and film cameras now are super cheap.

So the question is…with all the choices what is the best camera to have?