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farewell cameras

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

The household is now down to just two cameras. In the past two weeks I have taken my old Olympus 35DC, Mari's old Fuji F30, and the Kodak Easyshare Z612 I bought for the kids to the recycling drop-box at the local community center.

Of the three, the Olympus got by far the most use. I put a dozens of rolls of film through it, and still have nearly 800 frames (the "keepers") on this website. I loved to roam Tokyo with my bike and that camera. But after having it repaired twice I resigned myself to the facts that it had completely broken down. The light sensor was completely inoperable, and the shutter was iffy. When the thing somehow got stuck with the timer lever down (I suspect it must have had a fall when I wasn't around) I couldn't get that undone. And since my film scanner is in a box in a storage room I've never visited in Toronto there wasn't a lot of reason to carry on.

The Fuji was probably a bad purchase from the outset - it was a gift for my then-new girlfriend in 2006 and came at a time when digital photography was in transition. It cost too much at about 50,000 yen and it proved a little slow. It captured great colors and the lens was good but the smartphone came out at the same time and those have completely obliterated the market for point and shoot digital cameras. It looks like only about 270 photos taken with that camera are on this website - at about two dollars per frame that's not great. The last of those photos was more than two years ago. So; bye-bye.

And then there was the Kodak. Both of my kids learned to shoot on that cheap and cheerful device, and despite its creaky plasticky body I found it a marvel. But the kids haven't used it in nearly four years and while we brought it to Japan there's no reason to take it any further. I'll miss it in a way, but one of the surviving digital cameras is Emma's Olympus O-MD EM-5 Mk II, a mirrorless interchangeable-lens system on which she's learning exposure controls and framing.