My parents gave an old “Brownie” camera to me when I was 12 years old back in 1958. I think it was a “Target Six-20” model. I remember loading the black and white film, which came on a spool, and I think I had to pull on the spool tab to extract the film. Then I’d put the leader into the take-up spool on the other side of the camera’s insides. I’d close the back door of the camera after loading the film, advance the film into the take-up spool by winding and snapping the shutter a few times, and then I was ready! Of course the results were much less than outstanding. If I hadn’t advanced the leader enough onto the take-up spool, the first picture or two that I snapped didn’t show up when they came back from Thrifty Drug Store, where I had the roll of film developed. Or the pictures were blurry because I moved when I snapped the shutter. Or the pictures were “foggy” for one reason or another.
Over the years I graduated to 35mm single-lens-reflex cameras and had better success with my picture taking. For flash pictures in 1965, I used Sylvania “Blue Dot” flashbulbs and I had to remember to set my camera for a shutter speed no faster than 1/60th of a second. Then about 8 years ago I got my first digital camera. Wow! What a difference!!! The first thing I realized was that I could take as many pictures as I wanted, limited only by the storage device that I used. This feature was so much better than film, where I was limited by the number of possible exposures on a roll of film (and yes, I still had to “thread” the 35mm film in those cameras as well as my first “Brownie”) and the number of film rolls I had with me. But now, with the ability to take hundreds, if not thousands of pictures with my digital, I could experiment with my picture taking. If I didn’t like the way a picture turned out, I could delete the image either in the camera or on my computer. This was, to me, the keystone of digital picture taking. Also, I didn’t have to remember to set the shutter speed for flash pictures – just set the digital camera flash on “Automatic” and the pictures came out great nearly all the time. As with most electronic gizmos, the image quality of the digital cameras seemed to grow exponentially, so that now a good 10-12 megapixel (MP) camera is relatively inexpensive, costing about as much today as a 3MP camera 10 years ago.
Digital picture taking has also crept into the ubiquitous cell phones we all seem to have. Many brands of cell phones have the ability to take digital pictures, although most phones do not have the quality and clarity of a camera. But don’t we use cell phones mostly for calling, rather than taking pictures? The Blackberry and Razr cell phones in my recommendations here are truly amazing machines, and for my money, are worth every penny of the purchase price.
|
