Sheila's Posts

My first camera was a Minolta SR-T 101. I remember having bought it on my 19th birthday in October of 1973. I was happily impressed by the prints from my first roll of film developed. I scanned one of those old (and now faded) prints to publish on a post called The Falls. A decade later, that camera was stolen (during the winter) from where I was living.

Towards the end of summer, almost two years after that theft, I purchased a Minolta X-700 to use for my college photography classes. Peter Correia was not only my instructor, but he was also my daughter’s instructor too when she took the same classes. I gave her my camera to use.

We both had numerous photos we shot, developed, and printed that were put on display in the college’s art gallery. I recently scanned one from my old collection to put into this post. It’s a photo I took of my daughter, a couple of months before she turned three years old, for class back in the fall of 1985. I forgot about it until she retrieved it back for me, after seeing it still hanging on Mr. Correia’s office wall, when she was his student. The print wasn’t protected, so it got damaged somewhat.

As you can see, the photo on the right is much less faded. It’s a scanned print of a photo my daughter also took for Mr. Correia’s class. It wasn’t until the beginning of March in 2006 when I bought the third camera in my life. It’s also my first digital camera, which I still have and use. Panasonic is its manufacturer. The model is a Lumix DMC-FZ30.

It’s a bridge digital camera and has a 12x optical zoom Leica lens and OIS (optical image stabilization, that I probably forget to employ most of the time). I’ve never used any other digital camera before, so I can’t say how I’d rate it against others.¹ This rugged camera is all I need to be content for taking photos. For over four years, it’s been dependable and does its job to my satisfaction.

All of my photos taken before March 2006 are prints from film. The others after those are digital images that rarely get printed. I like things simple and basic, so even though I tinkered around years ago with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 for Windows to see what it’s like, about the only thing I might do with a photo anymore is either resize or crop one once in a while. I have no interest in starting to make any videos either.

[Edit added the next day] — Probably the main reason for my diminished interest in photography is because of the internet. When you’re financially unable to explore the world offline, it only leaves the option of doing it second-hand through the experiences of others who share theirs online. Take this morning for example; I was mesmerizingly lost in time from being stunned by the magnificent beauty coming through the images found on page after page of the blog Summit Stones & Adventure Musings.

¹I know cell phones can now do many things, besides taking photos and videos. However, I don’t have one; never have and probably never will. The desire simply doesn’t exist for me.