Thursday, June 17, 2010

My First Blue Camera with the Yellow Button...

On my 5th birthday, my parents gave me a bright blue Fisher Price/Kodak camera and took me on a Riverboat ride.  After we'd eaten a meal and I blew out the candles on my cake, they took me up the stairs and to the top of the boat and let me snap away at my surroundings: I snapped away at them, at the boat with the big wheel, and at the Missouri River as we floated along. 



Words cannot describe how excited my new blue present made me feel.  I loved the feel of pressing the yellow button down everytime I took a picture, and I wanted to master the way my mom rewinded the film for me by using the button on the bottom of the camera. 

While my 5-year-old self looked out the lens of the camera, everything I saw was beautiful, and it didn't matter if I cut off a few heads in my pictures or that I actually missed the log that drifted down the river beside our boat with the big wheel.  In my mind that day I'd captured what I saw, and everything was beautiful. 


It was a Birthday and a present that I will always remember...



"Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are."
~Susan Sontag

Read about another person's love for the same camera at the age of 5 and see a picture of the little blue camera!   Blog Entry with picture of camera: Ode to Film from the blog titled Will Work For Clothes

5 comments:

Rita said...

These are priceless!
My first camera was a black box camera my dad got me before we went to Yellowstone. It had black and white film. It was awesome!! :)
These are great, Jennifer!

Jenifleur-de-lis said...

Thanks Rita! :) Your first camera sounds really fun too! And I bet you took lots of great pictures in Yellowstone! Hey...I like your new profile picture too!

Rita said...

I was ten when I got mine (1961, my goodness!).

Thanks! I thought it was about time I got a more current picture. Took one of myself--hehe!

Sara Louise said...

When I was 11, I got a blue polaroid camera for my birthday. I thought that camera was the coolest thing ever!

Jenifleur-de-lis said...

Sara Louise - polaroids were pretty cool back in the day! I was always "borrowing" my mom's camera. Unfortunately she took a lot of pictures with that thing over the years and now the film is slowly getting ruined because the pictures are falling apart. I'm working hard to scan them so they are preserved!