It might be years since I took out my old Olympus camera and looked at it. I thought about it today so when I got home, I took a couple of pictures of my old camera. I can't bring myself to get rid of it even though I know these cameras sell now for only a couple of bucks at thrift stores, and what I did with my little point-n-shoot camera (taking these pictures...) would have cost several dollars and taken days to develop, but man, I miss this camera--bad!
I got this camera for Christmas in either '81 or '82 and I can't adequately express how much I loved it. It wasn't the most expensive Olympus. The OM-1's and OM-2's were the professional models. Think of this as the Mazda Miata of cameras. And when my mom bought the Manual Adapter, I became a real photographer. I could manually adjust the shutter speed, or allow the Olympus brain to take over. It was so far beyond the Kodak Instamatic I had...
I know there are a lot of photographers out there, and each love their cameras. I had friends who had Pentax cameras, Canons were popular, and, of course, Nikons were hard to beat, but for me, I loved, loved, loved my little Olympus. When I looked at the camera tonight I felt like someone who saw a classic car, one like the one they drove in high school. It brought back a lot of memories.
I have yet to own a modern digital SLR and I look forward to one day buying my first one. I think the photography world is a little less personal with all the technology that's available today. There's something about snapping the shutter and wondering if you caught the light just the way you wanted to, or had the picture in focus and if you weren't sure you took another picture (just in case...) You had to be careful not to take too many pictures because you only had 24 shots, or 32 if you felt extra rich. And picking up that package of developed film and quickly shuffling through all the prints to see if the pictures turned out was exciting in its own way. There was something innocent in all that...something that's gone.
I've taken literally thousands of pictures since I began my "Pic Of The Day" posts on this blog and on Facebook. The cost of those pictures would be staggering if I had to pay for them as I did back when I operated my trusty OM-10. But maybe in some way, the cost might be worth it. I sure do miss that camera.
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