Day: March 25, 2007

Note to self mostly I guess:

Goodbye old buddy lens. I bought this lens in 1980 AFTER I returned from a trip to the Carribean (or Caribbean) so the next time I went someplace like that I’d have a camera. I never went someplace like that again.

In 1980, I was fat and rich and life was a lark and going into Sportsman’s and buying some camera stuff for a thousand dollars was no big deal. Learning to USE the camera stuff WAS a big deal (for me), and I wasn’t going to “get that” for years to come.

In the meanwhile, the camera dutifully recorded family trips, holiday occasions, the occasional artistic effort on my part (which was mostly pictures of bugs, a subject I still like), all which took on a vaguely familiar look because I had no composition skills whatsoever when it came to taking pictures. Many of those photos are now sadly stored under suboptimal conditions, and I haven’t gotten them out to review since 1995, at which time I quit reviewing lots of stuff.

My son, however, landed a job as a newspaper photographer one day, a ride which has taken him far, and since he didn’t have a camera and the newspaper really didn’t either, he used mine until he could get some professional grade equipment. So the Canon 50mm found a new life late in its tour of duty, chronicling events around Spencer Iowa, a task I suspect it enjoyed, because ButtonPushing IS a master photographic composer.

Then eBay came along. For an amazingly long time, I used film photos there, ultimately frying my original Canon AT-1 body on September 11, 2001, trying to calm myself down by taking idyllic night time Clay County Fair photos, but I replaced that body with an eBay AE-1, and kept shooting with the same lenses.

After years of that, I finally went digital, and the lenses fell into disuse, and I re-eBayed the body and the other lenses, but I held onto this lowly little 50mm, not so much because it’s one of the most common lenses on the market, as because it meant something sentimental to me.

In the recent year, though, sentimentality has become an albatross, so the other day, the lens went to its new home, trading at a whopping $18.98.

Goodbye, old buddy.

I kept the special cover though…..the Commemorative Anniversary one Canon put out that year or thereabouts, which has long been covered by a round Grateful Dead metal Steal Your Face sticker.

I’ll get it out every once in a while, and think of all those photos of places like Mount Rushmore that I blew…….

Realized $18.98 3/25/7