Dan's Cameras Part Three - It Begins

It took me over two years before I was able to get my first camera.  It was not for wanting though.  At one point in high school I was thinking about making the leap.  A lot.  For quite a few months I was eyeing a Rolleiflex 35mm SLR (single lens reflex) camera I’d seen at a Ritz camera shop near where Grandma used to work, just waiting to save enough money to buy it.  Man did I fall in love with that camera.  Maybe it was because my friend John’s uncle in Germany had a Rolleiflex, maybe because it was all black, but it was such a well made instrument and it felt so solid in my hands.

rolleiflex_SL35M

I can’t remember why, but by the time I’d saved up enough money to buy it I decided against the Rollei, or any other camera for that matter.  I guess my mind was onto other things, like saving up for college.  Still, every time I went to the mall (particularly Best Buys) I’d look at the Nikons, Minoltas and Canons (sometimes before, sometimes after the stereo stuff) and think about which one I’d eventually buy.

Then the moment came.  During the first week at Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture my 1st year studio colleagues and I were told that we should consider investing in a good camera - that we’ll use it a lot over the next five years.  And they said to buy a “real” camera, not some point and shoot thing.  That was all I needed to convince me that I needed a good, basic SLR and no arguments from my parents or anyone else was going to convince me otherwise.  Sure, I was on a limited budget for the year and didn’t have a lot of discretionary funds saved up, but I had enough.  All I had to do was a bit of research (relatively easy) and then to finally decide between the Minolta SRT 201/202 or the Nikon FM/FE (not so easy).  The differences between each pair of modes was whether it was manual only or also included automatic modes.  

In the end I decided to upgrade on the brand, but downgrade on the model.  We had been told that we should make sure to get a camera that had interchangeable lenses and manual controls, and that if we were really interested in photography, we should get a fully manual camera.  So I did and bought a Nikon FM with the standard 50mm f1.8 lens even though it was appreciably more expensive than even the Minolta SRT 202.

Nikon_FM

I quickly realized that a 50mm wasn’t really wide enough for architecture work, so it wasn’t long before I invested in a fairly inexpensive 28mm f2.8 wide angle lens made by Quantaray (a Ritz brand of unknown origin).  I’d spent most of the extra spending money I had for the year to upgrade to the Nikon, so the price difference between the Nikon 28mm and the Quantaray was much harder to justify - I simply didn’t have it.  To be honest though, the Quantaray was a very good lens that gave me many good photographs over a couple of decades of use, so it wound up being a bargain.

That one-camera, two-lens set up was my sole camera kit from the end of 1978 until late 1983.  It was the gear I cut my photography teeth on and it served me well on several trips to New York City (the views and photos from the top of the World Trade Center at night were the best in the city; the Guggenheim museum; Alvar Aalto’s conference room at the Institute of International Education; the Ford Foundation Building; and so many others), a cross-country trip where I discovered the amazing beauty of the American landscape and the stunning wonders of the desert southwest, Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute, and the photo mecca Big Sur.  During that period my primary focus was on photographing architecture and the built environment.

That kit also got me an architecture internship (because my portfolio demonstrated I could photograph architecture models for the firm) where I got credit (and paid) for working one year, got to work with a professional photographer for the firm on a couple of occasions and, most importantly, realized I enjoyed photographing much more than designing architecture and was quite a bit better at it too.  Still, I had no more than a basic understanding of the technical aspects of photography, minimal darkroom skills and a limited knowledge of great photographers.

That quickly changed my last year in architecture school.