Six years ago, when I took up photography, resisting the lure of digital photography, intrigued by the possibility of taking black and white photographs that could be enlarged to poster-sized prints, I bought a used medium-format twin lens reflex camera, a Yashicamat 124, possibly 30+ years old, surely based on technology reaching back to the 1930s.
![[cameras]](cameras.gif)
Those initial explorations of composed,
mostly static, subjects, however, in time came to merge with a desire
to explore motion. So I ventured off into the film world of 35 mm.
Portable cameras, more likely pocketable, action-oriented, on-the-fly
street shooters.
So from two medium-format cameras (one gets 12 shots a roll, another
but 8) to my half-frame camera that gets a staggering 72 shots out of a
roll of 35 mm film, I have a range of camera choices.
I realize I'm justifying six different cameras to take pictures; I
wouldn't have to do this if I stated at the outset that I was a mere collector of camera technology.
But the overriding reason I have six camera is pretty straightforward: Fine, used film cameras are very cheap, compared to what their original owners paid decades ago. The shift to digital (and that includes virtually all professionals) led to a glut of used equipment on the market. The challenge is to sort out what's usable, what's nearly good as new, from what is not.
Read Charlie Dickinson's
story collection, The Cat
at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable
formats:
.mobi
(Kindle)
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.pdf (for PCs)
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