I may have taken my first pictures with an Olympus SLR with a silvery body and manual everything, when I was a wee lad of 4 or 5 or 6.
Later, my parents sold it (my mother still regrets that) and bought a compact camera, it may have been a Konica.
And I got a Kodak camera that was Polaroid compatible.
At about the same time, I thought that multiple exposures on the same frame of film would be cool, but of course the compacts didn't support that. I was left dreaming.
We got our second compact, a pretty advanced and expensive Pentax model. It took good pictures for a compact.
And in 1987, someone broke into our home, stole silverware, weapons and the two compacts. My parents decided on the brand new EOS 650 as a replacement for both cameras, the 620 was announced but not available yet. Perceptive that I was, I noticed that the 620 sported a backlit panel and supported multiple exposures, and wasn't
that cool. Too late, though.
However, I soon had my triumph, as my grandfather helpfully donated his Eastman Kodak No. 2 Folding Cartridge Hawkeye Model B! Yeah, 120 film was a bit more expensive, larger and impractical compared to 35mm, but who cares? I could do multiple exposures, with a really cool camera!
Needless to say, those multi-exposure shots didn't turn out too well.
Next off was a new compact 35mm camera, one of those models that companies used as gifts. It was and is incredibly simple, but it did the trick for holiday pics. Brand? No idea, it's in a drawer somewhere.
That compact hasn't been used since 1999, when I bought my first digicam, after lots of research. I really wanted a Minolta dImage, because that came out best in tests, but ended up with an Agfa ePhoto CL50, because that was available. A huge blob of a "compact", couldn't fit into any shirt pocket I've ever seen, and 1.3 megapixels. It produced adequate holiday pictures, and especially excellent for web.
An ill-advised choice lead me to sell that CL50 later the same year -- to my parents, who kept on using it instead of their EOS 650 until last year (which saw intermittent use during the nineties, by them and me both). You see, I got bitten by the digital video camcorder bug. That lasted a handful or more of tapes, and I sold that one, too.
Back to the stupid, forgotten compact in the drawer, and wait for something better to crop up.
And in 2002, I managed to buy the Canon PowerShot S40. Now that was an excellent buy, and it actually got me started with photography on a hobby basis again.
During 2003, I realized that I wasn't really happy with the quality of compacts. I lusted for better stuff. The last half of 2003 and most of 2004 was spent deliberating and debating what to do.
So in late 2004, I called on my parents and asked to borrow the 650 again; they told me to just take it, had I called the day after, they'd have given it away already ... I wanted to use it to make a decision on whether to use that camera, buy a digital SLR or a new digital compact camera. I bought ISO 800 film for shooting indoor shots, and got the first roll scanned by professionals.
I
compared those shots with what I got from the S40 from the same lighting conditions at the same place.
That killed film for me, and I nearly ran to the store to get my current 20D.
I'm now just worried that I've started down a path of even greater expenses than any other hobby I've had so far. I see a 1D-series camera purchase looming on the horizon.