Old Pics #2 - Cameras

Even at a young age I was armed with a camera!  You can ask most anyone I know and they'll tell you 95% of the time I have a camera on me snapping shots here and there.  My interest in cameras and photography began when I was a toddler, as you can see in the old photo from the early 80's.  My grandfather (I called him Gramps) loved photography, he was one of the few people I knew that owned a Polaroid camera in the 80's.  He wasn't alone, my grandmother (Grammy) took her fair share of photos also, helping to document my early years.  These years sparked something inside me and by the time I was a teen I always had a disposable camera on hand.  I wouldn't say it's the actual camera or composition of the photo that keeps me interested, documenting life is why I tote a camera around.  My teenage years and early 20's were caught on film, whether it should have been or not.  Really how many drunken party photos does a teenager need?  I could have blackmailed half of my high school, if needed, ha-ha!  Throughout the years I have thrown out a lot of the unneeded pics from school but I did keep some to help spark the memories.  I guess that's what photos are to me, memories you don't want to forget, but when life gets busy those memories slowly disappear into the dark cervices of our minds and these photos bring the moments back to life.  Since we bought our first digital camera sometime in the early 00's photography has changed for me.  I take too many pictures, making them almost lose their importance.  When you have one picture of you and your first dog, you hold on to it and cherish it.  When you have 500 of your latest dog, well, the meaning sort of fades.  But no matter what, I keep documenting.  My relationship with my husband, our wedding, honeymoon, vacations, pregnancy, all of it's in pictures.  And just like my grandparents, I am now photo documenting my daughters life.  And since blogging and getting to often use my father-in-laws Digital SLR camera well, a new world has opened.  My creativity is slowly breaking through.  But I must admit, I remember very little from my high school photography class and I still have a long journey ahead.  The biggest problem I face when working with the DSLR is my vision, I wear contacts and it's quite hard for me to get the clear shots I imagine once I've taken it off automatic.  It's kind of hard being a photographer when you have crap vision!  My collection of photos keeps growing and growing though, not only do I collect pics we've taken, I also collect childhood pics taken by other family members.  And I have real fascination with old-old photos.  My grandmother keeps me supplied with pics of her relatives long gone.  And I find plenty of websites supplying photos of what cities looked like when cameras first came to be in the 1800's.  Have you ever seen a pic of your street from 1901 or 1918, I've seen mine!  Nowadays people tend to capture their lives through the cameras on their phones, maybe one day that'll be me too (I had a short stint of phone pics until I messed up the lens), but for now I'll stick to my little point and shoot digital camera.