I’ve had the camera bug since I was an elementary school kid, but it wasn’t until high school that it began to get really serious, and the finger candy really expensive.  Luckily mom was pretty forbearing about my turning the one bathroom in our little two bedroom apartment into an occasional darkroom.  She always encouraged my creative outlets.

I’ve been going through my old high school negatives recently for a couple projects I’m working on here and I came across a few shots I took of myself in my bedroom mirror with the latest prized camera.  Here are three documenting my climb up the SLR latter, from my first Petri FT to the professional grade Canon F1 I spent a summer working at a fast food joint to buy. 

The Petri FT, circa 1970. I’m 16.

The Miranda Sensorex, circa 1971.  I’m 17.

The F1, circa 1971.

Note the little plastic film canisters I’d taped to the camera straps.  That was the style back then among us camera kids.  It kept your spare film handy and it made you look hard core.  But when I got out into the world and tried to make a living at it I found that they just got in the way…so I ended up taking them off. 

Both the Petri and the Miranda had front mounded shutter releases instead of the usual top mounted, which was and is unusual (I don’t think any camera maker does that anymore), but I found I preferred it.  The Miranda had full aperture semi-spot metering and a removable pentaprisim.  But when I saw that first Canon F1 in the store I knew that was the camera I could spend a lifetime taking pictures with. 

The flash you see on the F1 is just for show in this picture.  I very seldom used a flash, even back then.  Once I started developing my own film I pretty quickly gravitated to Kodak’s Tri-X Pan which was high speed for the time, but if you were careful about how you developed it you could get pretty nice not-so-grainy available light images off it.  All these images are from Tri-X negatives.  The only time I every really used the flash back then was when I was covering sports events for my school newspaper (it was called The Advocate… (grin))  Note how the flash hot shoe actually clipped on over the rewind knob on the original F1.

The Petri and the Miranda got sold, each one to help fund the purchase of the next.  But I still have that F1 and I still use it and it’s been with me just about everywhere.  It took all the 35mm color shots you see in my current photo gallery.  That camera’s the best.  I’d sell the house before I’d sell that camera.

Oh…and I still have the little stuffed tiger you see there perched in front of my dresser mirror.