I couldn't believe it! I now had a real life, honest to goodness, 35mm SLR camera! It may sound like I'm making a big deal out of such a small thing but, at that moment, I was in heaven. On our way out of J.C. Penny's, we stopped off at the camera department to pick up some film. The guy sold me a couple of rolls of Kodak "Tri-X" black and white. He said it was the best film you could have in your camera because it was "fast and versatile". I had no idea what that meant. I just knew I wanted "the best". We got home and I tore into the boxes that held my new possession. [ O.K. , I didn't really "tear into them". But I sure got that camera out in a hurry. ] It was all new and shiny. The lens was spotless. There were dials and levers everywhere. It was at that moment I suddenly came to the realization ..... "I had no idea how to use this thing"! Up until then, the closest I came to a real camera was my cousin Bobby's Minolta. Oh well .... I guess I will just have to read the instructions. I poured through the manual, looked at the illustrations, and figured I knew enough to get things going. I prepared to "load my camera" for the first time. By the way, one of the reasons the Canon TX was only 250 bucks including the lens was because it was the basic, stripped down model. No frills, nothing fancy. Which also excluded Canon's new "QL" film loading. That particular feature allowed you to just place the film leader across the back of the camera, close the back, and begin advancing the film to the first shot in the roll. I had read all about in preparation for my new camera but, unfortunately for me, my camera did not have it. I did exactly as I had read in the magazine ads. All loaded up, I headed outside to "capture the world". It was amazing how different things looked through the lens of a camera. Different angles gave different results. I blasted through that first roll of film in record time. Shooting anything and everything. Our dog. My house. The ditch behind our house that looked like a shear cliff through the viewfinder of my new TX. It was a blast! I headed back to the house to reload. I guess I didn't read the part about loading and unloading very well. I just opened the camera back without "rewinding the film" back into the cassette! It was then that I realized two things.
1. You must rewind the film back into the cassette before you open the back of the camera.
2. My camera didn't have the QL loading system so, every shot I took on my first day out with my new camera wasn't there.
I had spent my time shooting without film going through the camera. It became a valuable lesson about reading the instructions, learning how to load a camera correctly, and taking what I considered at the time to be "a new toy", seriously.
Nothing about photography would ever be the same for me again.
That was my first SLR, got it in ahh, 1977?
ReplyDelete