Louise and Donny at Bahia Honda State Park, Florida, May, 1969.
Photography has many functions. I made a living with my cameras for many years, and that was a truly important function. But for me, and probably for most of us, the camera's most important function is to serve as a memory-making machine.
In May, 1969, near the end of our first year teaching at Miami's Florida Christian School, Louise and I took the graduating seniors on an overnight outing to Bahia Honda State Park in the Keys. (We were class sponsors.)
Louise, Rob, 11-month-old Donny, and I had our little Ted Williams pop-up camper (I wrote about it here), while the students had tents and sleeping bags. As the saying goes, "A great time was had by all."
The camera I took with me on that trip was a Petri rangefinder with an f2.8 lens, very similar to this one. It was not new when I bought it, and I didn't pay much for it. But I made a lot of pictures with that camera, almost all of them on color negative (print) film. The prints are not the sharpest, but the memories they bring back are sharp indeed. I still have most of those prints, and I've also scanned them with an Epson Perfection 4990 flatbed scanner and stored them in my computer. Best of both worlds!
I simply can't overemphasize the importance of making prints and backing up your photos in your computer. Many of my readers, if not most, are making family snapshots with their cell phones. And that's great! Cell phone photography is quick, convenient, and entirely suitable for family snaps. But they also can vanish into the ether very easily if we don't take care to back them up. So choose the ones that mean most to you and email them off to Shutterfly or some other printing service. It's quick, easy, and cheap. You will never regret it.
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Photography and text copyright 2025 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.