This summer, as I do every summer, I’ll head off to the U.S. with my wife on a road trip.  This summer, we’ll wind up as far west as California before we turn back for home.  On that trip, I’ll be carrying two camera bags containing no less than five camera bodies with lenses and associated gear.  As it turns out, five is the number of cameras I remember having bought (or stolen) throughout the course of my entire life prior to walking into a store on a whim and purchasing my first dSLR.

I was very, very proud of my first camera.  It was some variety or other of a Kodak Instamatic, and I shot many a cartridge of 12-exposure 126 film with it.  The photo quality, as I recall, was absolutely abysmal.  On the other hand, it allowed me to immortalize the middle to late 1970s in all their Afro-wearing, bell-bottomed, velour-clad glory.  Somewhere in either my father’s closet or my sister’s basement, I could probably find album after album of grainy, discoloured, out-of-focus photos and envelopes full of crumbling negatives.

I stole my next camera … from my Mom.  She’d bought herself a Praktica 35mm SLR (probably an MTL3, but I don’t remember the precise model) along with a couple of M42 screw-mount lenses and a shoe-mount flash from our local Consumer’s Distributing outlet.  As it turns out, I was the one who had the camera in my hands more often than not, so I used it for a couple of years to shoot photos for my high school yearbook.  I promptly managed somehow to rip the hotshoe from the top of the camera (and glued it right back onto the camera so that no-one would know and so that I would stay out of trouble).  That camera, once I gave it back, stayed with my Dad for another twenty years or so until it was stolen from the back seat of his car.  It seems that karma has a way of catching up with us one way or another.

My next camera turned out to be a 35mm point-and-shoot Minolta Freedom AF Tele Super that I rescued from a lost-and-found bin.  Although that camera served me well, it was at this time – at the age of twenty-one or so – that I put down my cameras.  I can’t explain why I didn’t shoot more nor why, considering how much I like to shoot now, I didn’t continue to shoot photos with one camera or another.  If I went down into my kitchen right now, I could almost certainly find that old thing taking up space in a drawer.

Imagine my excitement as my next camera catapulted me into the digital age!  It was 2001, and digital cameras were the newest thing.  I HAD TO HAVE ONE.  I bought a used camera from a friend of mine – it was a Toshiba model, and the file resolution was a whopping 0.6 megapixels.  I actually took that camera to the hospital when my daughter was born, and the first photos of her were taken with it.  I didn’t keep it for very long.  That particular model may not have been as robustly built as I might have liked, and its resolution certainly left a lot to be desired, but with it I took some of the photos I treasure most in this world.

And then I wound up buying and shooting at least one HP Photosmart camera.  I count every version of this camera as the very same thing … they all looked the same, produced the same results, and lasted for about six months before it was time to get a new one.  The thing I remember most about these cameras is that I was able to use a 4 MB (yes, megabyte) card for photo storage.  The Photosmart 215 that I dug out of a drawer recently had a 16 MB card to hold the massive photos delivered by its whopping 1.3 megapixel sensor.

Each of the cameras I’ve used has been memorable in one way or another.  And it occurs to me that at the time I was using each camera, being able to let go of it was the further thing from my mind.  That’s true of the cameras in my bag now, as a matter of fact.  I would be willing to bet that as long technology allows the files from my digital cameras to be manipulated and the negatives from my film cameras to be printed, I’ll have them around.