My Cameras

You may have noticed I am a bit of a photo nut. I have been that way since I left journalism school some years ago. News Photography was a mandatory course. This was in the days before cell phone cams, before digital cams and even before video cameras! There has always been something fun about capturing a moment by snapping a picture. I say this even though I worked in television for many years. Nothing fascinates me more than a really good still photograph. A lot of people feel that way. I have to give my Dad some credit. He was an avid shooter for years. He had a fantastic little Braun Super Paxette 35MM range finder camera he bought in Germany. The optics were amazing and Dad shot hundreds and hundreds of slides. He let me use that Braun until I was able to buy my own 35MM, a used Miranda SLR. I used it plenty in my first journalism job, when I covered college sports for the North Bay Nugget. When I moved to Timmins I got my first ever bank loan at the CIBC. I ran over to Royal Studio on Balsam Street and bought a brand new Nikkormat, with a venerable Nikkor lens for $425. That was a lot of money in 1974. I was finally in the big leagues with a pro press camera. It meant as much to me as a Fender Stratocaster guitar to Jimi Hendrix. I can’t remember how many hundreds of rolls of film passed through that camera in the pursuit of news stories – forest fires, floods, blizzards, car accidents, river rescues, mine disasters. I know I was shooting roughly three rolls of film each day for The Daily Press. Film was cheap. We used Kodak Tri-X. As much as I loved that Nikkormat, I really had my eye on another camera. Every time I opened LIFE magazine, there it was. The NIKON Photomic. Every time LIFE featured one of its photographers, there was a NIKON hanging around his neck.. I drooled. It was then the world’s fastest camera with a shutter speed of 1/2000th of a second. It had special lubricants that wouldn’t freeze up in sub zero temperatures causing the film to break. It was late fall in 1975 when I walked into the Canadian Camera Centre at The 101 Mall. Orest Lawryniw, the proprietor, was there with a grin on his face. There was only one Nikon for sale in Timmins and there it was in the glass case. For several days I admired it. Then I figured what the heck, it’s only money. I bought it. The price was $1,250. The Auto Nikkor lens was another $240. I really couldn’t afford it, so I laid off on beer and cigarettes for awhile. That camera saw lots of action. Over the years I shot pictures for the front pages of The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. I also sold plenty of pictures to Canadian Press, Reuters and United Press International, all with stories from Northern Ontario. And now I have a brand new camera and so my interest in photography has been revived! It’s a beauty. It’s one of those new digital cameras. I tried a small one for a couple of years before I was convinced it was as good as, if not better than, film cameras. I did my research and fretted a bit, but had to settle on the reputation and reliability of NIKON. So I am the proud owner of a new D50, so expect to see plenty of images in here from now on.