self-portrait

My Canons

FTb

It began when, after years of using simple point and shoot cameras  I decided to use money that I had earned from working during various jobs. It was 1972 and I was 19 years old when I bought my own serious camera, a Canon FTb single lens reflex with interchangeable lenses.

With that camera my true photography career began. I photographed my family including my older brother's wedding. I was allowed to carry my camera to work when my supervisor at a department in the huge Chicago Post Office building wrote a letter saying that I was using it for official business. The following year, I recorded images from my first ever visit to New York City (when it survived an attempt at theft by a hitchhiker I had picked up).

Later I got a job in a corporation where I became the staff photographer with my work extensively published. I photographed inside Cook County Jail and within the walls of the YMCAs where I lived when I was financially struggling. I used the camera for assignments in photography classes at Columbia College, including my first nude self-portraits. And I used it for photojournalism involving urban life, and I took pictures of kids that I helped tutor. My Canon was aimed at architecture and cityscapes, nature/sunsets and many portraits of co-workers and friends.

My Canon FTb traveled to New York City with me multiple times until I finally relocated to the city in 1978. It was still vital to my photography career. But one evening  in July of 1979, I had been out with my female British boss at a part-time job I worked in Midtown Manhattan. I had photographed her previously with her telling me afterward that she loved the pictures I had taken of her. We took a taxi to her apartment in the United Nations Plaza apartments on East 48th Street. I paid the taxi driver and asked him to wait while I walked her to the front door of the building. I was going to come right back to take the taxi further. My camera and my portfolio where in the back seat.

Suddenly, the taxi driver gunned the accelerator and fled with my FTb inside along with many of my photographs that were even more critical and priceless to me. He didn't care. He saw the opportunity to steal what was likely a camera in my bag. He almost ran a light in his haste, doing everything he could to get away with something that was valuable. I ran behind the taxi but could not catch him. My boss saw what happened and felt bad, as though it was partially her fault. But there was nothing either of us could do. I called the police but they were entirely unwilling to take a report. They didn't care.

I learned valuable lesson that night. I never again trusted anyone with my cameras. I never allowed any luggage containing anything valuable to be in the trunk of a taxi cab. Any important possession since then has to rest with me alone in a taxi or anywhere else. Where I go, my equipment and electronics go, at times as if they were surgically attached to me.

AE-1 Program

Nevertheless, I was suddenly without a camera and even more devastating, some of my most precious images. I was a photographer without a way to photograph. And I didn't have much money. I worked full and part-time, I went to the School of Visual Arts at night and I photographed when and wherever I could but now I didn't have my essential tool. The situation couldn't last forever. I saved as much as I could as quickly as I could. Then I bought another SLR, the Canon AE-1 program.

My new Canon was not the only camera I used for photography assignments. I also rented cameras at various times for specific requests, such as the Canon F-1 and Nikon F2. But the AE1-Program lasted for a while and became my constant sidekick while I continued pursuing personal and professional images in the early 1980s.

A-1 and T-70

Within a few years, I bought a Canon A-1, which became a workhouse as well as my favorite camera  by far for film photography in the late 1980s and 1990s. The A-1 was the most pleasurable film camera I ever used and it was simply my great friend. I loved everything about it. To avoid overuse of the A-1, eventually I bought a Canon T-70 as a backup which also saw a lot of work.

Digitals

Beginning in the 2000s, I didn't think digital cameras had achieved the level of quality that I wanted, but by the summer of 2004, I experimented with point and shoot digital cameras in the form of the Canon PowerShot A80 which ended up giving decent images. In a few cases, the resulting photographs, including from my travels to the UK, were published on the cover of books.

I finally purchased a digital single lens reflex camera, the Canon XSi, in 2009 with a primary zoom lens and secondary zoom telephoto lens. A few years later in 2012 or 2013 I upgraded to a Canon T4i. As a backup for casual pictures. I bought another point and shoot, the Canon PowerShot SX50 HS in 2014 or 2015. These cameras were all given away in 2018 and 2019. The recipients were a clerk at a local deli who said he wanted to pursue photography, the brother of a friend who lives in Florida, and a close friend who lives in Queens, NY.

Canon 5D Mark IV

Still, I missed having a full-frame camera similar to the ones I had in the 1980s and 1990s. In October 2017 I corrected that problem with the purchase of a Canon 5D Mark IV. Again, as a spare, in 2018 I bought a Canon SL2 for less critical work. And in 2019, I purchased a Canon SL3 for a young nephew in another state.

Over the last almost 50 years, I have used a variety of cameras. I have also had wealthy coworkers, who considered themselves photographers, come to me and brag about the latest expensive camera they acquired in their attempt to convey how serious they were. But I have always remembered the words of a photography instructor at the beginning of my photography career. I have modified his thoughts somewhat into my own version: a good photographer can make a good picture with a primitive camera.

I've always believed that the image and not the tool is the most important. Cameras, lenses and accessories (flash, tripods, backgrounds, etc.) are like the brushes of a painter or the instrument of a musician. It is helpful to have equipment that enables your vision. But in the end, only the photographer can capture a subject that reveals his unique insight and perception of the world. It's not the camera, but the photographer who creates art.