family | writing notes

OK disclaimer nr 1: I have no children. Disclaimer nr 2: I fully expect to be flamed by my friends who do.

The little I know about parenting is obviously going to be flawed and biased, but that fits into the rest of the postings on this blog. One of the “kodak moments” of parenting seems to be when fathers or mothers teach there children grown up stuff. Some of the moments of greatest pride appear to be when the adult child calls home to ask banal questions such as how to balance a budget, check the oil or bake a cake.

But this is no longer the case. YouTube is flooded with simple instructional films. How to clean a toilet, How to shave your face, How to make burritos, How to tie a tie (or a bow tie), How to clean windows, and my favorite silly film How to make a bed (“to impress that special friend of yours”)…

Parents, can you see the writing on the wall? Why will your children ever call home again? So parents of the world unite, preserve your rightful place in the hierarchy and ban the threat. Parents Against YouTube (site coming soon near you).

The first camera I remember was my grandfather’s Ikoflex 1A 854/16

This is a very cool camera which I never really mastered. I now have this as a memory of my grandfather but after reading Ivor Matanle’s article on the history and use of the Ikoflex TLRs Classics to Use (Amateur Photographer, 29 October 2005) I have been inspired to test the camera.

My first camera was nothing this complex. I was eventually given a Kodak Instamatic with a cubeflash. I used this to take my first pictures.

There was an especially long gap between the Instamatic and my next camera. With my first paycheck I bought a Nikon F-301, a really cool toy which I used to experiment with. I tried out different lenses and external flashes. The only drawback was that I did not develop my own photos so experiments were slow and expensive. So I really did not make much progress. Eventually I dropped photography.

My hobby came back when I bought a Canon EOS 30 which was a really cool camera but still had the main drawback in that I needed to develop the photographs before I could analyze the mistakes I had made. Actually I should have gone straight to a digital version but due to some misguided snobbery I chose not to go digital.

Finally, I made the move to digital and got a Canon EOS 400D. Now I am happily taking photos, attempting to understand the results and develop what I see and learn. In addition to this, thanks to my Flickr account I am able to easily upload and share my photographs.

So by going digital I was able to develop my hobby to the extent that it actually can be called a hobby.