Through the lens (part I)

Ever since the  time I was a youngster, I have loved taking pictures. My first camera was an Ansco Cadet Reflex which took 127 size film. I got it prior to 1964, but in April of that year, I bought my first roll of color film and exposed it at the NY World's Fair. You very rarely saw me without my camera. I soon set up a darkroom, and a contact printer. It wasn't until I was married that I would actually have an enlarger.

By that time, my camera was a 35mm Contax RTS. It would remain my camera until the age of digital photography was upon us. I took the camera everywhere and spent hours in the darkroom. Many of my prints got submitted into contests and publications and every so often I would hit the jackpot. In fact, at the very moment I was talking with President Jimmy Carter, an editor was placing one of my pictures into a magazine to go along with one of my articles.

After my daughter was born, however, the darkroom reverted back to our kitchen, and while I still took a lot of pictures, they were more of the snapshot variety that dads tend to take of their kids.Today they are the type that a grandpa takes of the grandtwins.

But one place I never stopped taking lots of pictures was Walt Disney World (WDW) and Disneyland when I was there. As many times as I was in WDW though, it became harder and harder to take a picture that I had never taken before, so the challenge became - and remains - to find a new way of photographing something that I many have taken hundreds of pictures of over the years. Here are a few examples:

But recently I have seen a number of my friends posting their pictures and the old urge to go take pictures for the sake of taking them hit me hard.

I no longer am using an SLR (single lens reflex camera) and haven't yet purchased a D-SLR (digital single lens reflex camera), but am using a few year old "snapshot" camera. While I can't use it as manually as my old SLR, I do have some control over things such as aperture and shutter speed. I would really like more focusing control, but for now I rely on skill and luck to get me where I want to go. Using it is as much in manual mode as possible I set out for the first time on a photo excursion.

(Continue to part II and the start of my NYC photo journey)