Equipment History
Across the several decades in which I have been taking pictures there have been numerous cameras in my life with a wide variety of characteristics. This blatant display of sentimentality comes on the heels of the most recent addition to my collection: a Nikon D500. The capability of this camera is quite something, and gave me pause to reflect on its forebears.
Like most children (of my era - we used film back in those days) I had a variety of point-and-snap cameras that used the miniscule 110 film cartridges. I can’t really speak to the quality of said format, as the novelty of having my own camera far outweighed any technical considerations. If memory serves this camera had a blue case, and a built in flash, which made it Excalibur as far as a five year old was concerned.
The first 35mm SLR I had, though, came to me in my teen years and I still have this camera today. It was a Minolta. The Minolta was made from steel. It was heavy, and when the shutter release was pressed it was visceral. Many years later in the early 2000s I was very fortunate to receive as a gift a Nikon D100. This was one of the early professional grade DSLRs and was so far advanced from anything I had used previously that it felt like I was in a whole other world. I still have this camera as well, not only for sentimental reasons. The images I have from the D100, despite being only 6MP, have excellent contrast and hold up well even today. The print sizes are a lot smaller, but because the sensor is much lower resolution but still quite large, it produces a very clean, high-contrast images.
In between the D100 and today there were a number of other film and digital cameras, with which I produced some of my favorite black and white work, and easily my favorite work on film.
Today I shoot a Nikon D500 as my primary, and a Nikon D7100 as a backup. These cameras had more bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at, but are fundamentally not that different from my original Minolta SLR. Better metering, vastly improved auto-focus, but still entirely dependent on the user. Also, the shutter release doesn’t feel like an act of deliberate violence. Which is nice.