My Camera History, Part 2

I was always the friend with the camera. It sounds cliche, I know, but I was always taking tons of photos of my friends and everything else around me really. My mom had a sort of unofficial rule as to how many rolls of film she would get developed for me so I remember having a lineup of exposed film to be processed. I don’t remember using my neon pink camera for very long, likely because the film become rather obsolete and hard to find. The next camera I can remember was this guy…

A 135 film Samsung Maxima Zoom 70XL point-and-shoot. It is pretty beat up now, it got in this condition as it was sort of the workhorse of my camera past. This guy came to all of the events that I didn’t want to take my other ‘fancy’ camera to (once I got that other camera of course). I remember when I broke the flash cover. It was at a high school dance. I was on the dance floor with my friends and I smashed the camera against my hand (clapping to the beat of the music or something like that) and the little plastic cover broke. I was terrified that I would then touch the flash bulb as I had gotten it in my head that doing so would break the camera completely, so I covered it with clear tape and went on dancing.

But before it was damaged, this little camera came with me to Niagara Falls and the Butterfly Conservatory when I was in elementary school (our graduation trip) and helped me photograph our adorable new puppy when I first started high school. It captured many, many hilarious moments between friends and documented our daily lives.

I kept using that camera, and since it was already kind of broken, it became the camera I took into situations that may result in further damage to my camera. Every once in a while I would replace the tape covering the flash, just to make sure it was still kind of protected, but that was all I did to fix it up. Despite the lack of real repair, the camera has made it to this day and has certainly earned its spot displayed next to my other ‘fancier’ cameras from my past.