When I was a teenager I got a Polaroid One Step camera. It was a real novelty as you were able to take a picture and then watch it develop right before your eyes. Film was quite expensive even though it was just Black and White, and quality was very poor.
In High School I became interested in photography and I purchased all the supplies necessary to develop black and white film in a dark-room. (I used our bathroom and taped over all the places that would have let light in.) I also bought an enlarger which I used to print my own photos.
Since the chemicals were sensitive to light I used to keep them in a brown one gallon A&W Root Beer glass jug.
When I went to university the first year my Dad let me take his 35 mm camera. It looked like the one in this picture and it had a leather case. It was not a Single Lens Reflex camera. It had a view finder. At BYU Mary and I took another class in photography and we spent some quality time in a darkroom on campus . . . developing film and printing pictures. Unfortunately Dad’s camera was stolen so it never made it home from college.
Nikon L35AF2 (1985) This is the last 35 mm camera that we used. We used it for taking most of the pictures that we have in our many photo binders. We purchased film that cost about $5.00 per roll of 36 pictures. After we completed a roll of film (which was often so long after you started using the roll that you forgot what was on it) we then sent the film away in the mail to a low cost processing plant somewhere along ways away. We would then wait for 3 weeks and get back our photographs printed on 3X4 inch photo paper only to find that some of the pictures were out of focus or they cut off someone’s head etc. It would cost about 20 cents per picture to get them developed and about $2.00 per roll to send them away. If we wanted them sooner we would take them to Costco, or London Drugs because they had their own processing labs, but it was more expensive than sending them away. If it was Costco we would have to go back there after about 3 or 4 days and look through tons of orders to see if ours was done yet. If it was not done . . . all you could do is go back the next day to check again. We took a lot more pictures than most of the people we knew.
For many years Mary earned money by taking pictures of house for Atkinson & Terry Insurance. In the early years she used a Polaroid camera like this one. She would put Mike or Brian in the car and plan out a route that would get about 20 houses. She would travel all over the Lower Mainland and she became very good at it.
Eventually the polaroid camera gave way to the digital camera. This Fujifilm FinePix 2600 camera (2001) originally cost about $250.00. It featured a 3X auto-focus lens and the ability to record short video clips (although without sound). It had a 2.1 megapixel optical sensor, and 16MB of storage. That was enough storage for 20 to 30 pictures depending on the image size. It actually took better pictures than we were getting with the polaroid and it was much more cost effective.
Our next camera was this Canon PowerShot S50. It was a 5 mega pixel camera. In 2003 it cost about $600.00. It could do movie clips (including audio) at 15fps, max 3 min.
Our next camera was a Nikon Coolpix P7000. It cost about $500.00 in 2010 and had a 10 MP sensor with a 7X zoom lens.
Nikon Coolpix S640 (2009) 12.2 Megapixels, ultra-fast start-up and 5X wide-angle Zoom. This camera was nice because it was easy to carry it in your pocket. It did not have a view finder but rather a 2.7 inch display on the back that you look at to frame the picture.
The camera that I bought in 2014 is the first DSLR that I have owned. Nikon D3100. It is an entry level SLR with 14.2 megapixels and it can capture full HD movies. (1920x1080)
The only lens that I have at this point is a AF-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR. The camera was actually released in 2010 and cost about $550.00 At this time all of our children have much better cameras than this but this one seems to meet my interest level and I take a lot of pictures but many of them are taken on my phone or my GoPro.
GoPro Hero 3+ Silver edition This little camera cost about $400. It takes 1080p movies at 30 or 60 fps or 720p movies at 120 fps. It is easy to carry around and has accessories so you can attach it almost anywhere.
As of Jul 2018 I take most of my pictures on my cell phone. I probably take 100 pictures per month but that is because we use our cell phones to take pictures of products in a store so we can remember the price or damage to things that we want to show someone else, or documents that we want to keep a digital record of, or meals that we are eating, or the deer in our yard, or many other things that we would never have used a camera for in the days before cell phones.
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