My present camera companion: Casio Exilim EX-H30 (bought in May, 2011), here with a flexible “GorillaPod” attached.
For the portrait above I had to use my other digital one, a Nikon Coolpix 4600, bought in spring 2006:
The Coolpix has two advantages which may still sometimes make it useful:
1. It runs on common AA batteries.
2. It has an optical viewfinder.
However, the Exilim has a very good battery and can take LOTS of pictures before need of recharging. It has no optical viewfinder but it has a much better zoom. So I very rarely use the Coolpix now (except for tricky challenges like how to show you the back of the other one!).
I got my first camera when I was nine (back in 1964). It was an old one I ‘inherited’ from my dad, who also processed our black-and-white films himself back then.
My little brother with two playmates in 1965. Photo taken by me (at 10 years old) with my first camera; reproduced here with help of my present camera and a bit of digital editing, because the original is glued into an album with spiral spine which won’t lie flat on the scanner!
I don’t remember the name of that first camera or what happened to it. I never got very good at handling the manual settings. Through my teens and into my twenties, I had two or perhaps even three instamatics. At least one of them was a Kodak pocket one using the 110 format.
In 1983 before a journey to Germany I bought an Olympus XA2 with 3-zone autofocus, which allowed me to also take diapositives. That camera came to serve me well enough for 23 whole years until I bought my first digital one.
▲ Image of an XA2 from the Internet
A winter picture taken with the XA2 in 1984. Back then I was living in Karlstad north of Lake Vänern, and they were still floating timber down the river Klarälven.
Nowadays I live close to another river, Viskan.
Photo from December 2012.
Today (1 February 2013)
