My honeywell pentax Spotmatic 35mm film camera is obsolete and keeping it around for sentimental reasons just doesn’t make sense anymore. It was replaced by a cheap canon Powershot (digital) that fits in your pocket, takes digital pictures, and requires no developing. The canon served me well for most of ten years.

In 1980 I was 18 and using an Argus C3 similar to the one my dad owned. I bought it from the swap meet, i believe. I wanted to do more, hold a real camera in my hand and get up to date. As usual I went forward without knowing what I was doing. I spotted a camera at a pawn shop in magnolia Shopping Center in Goleta, California I talked to the proprietor and came back with cash and a trade. The trade was a Bell & howell reel to reel projector. The cash balance would pay for the $140 Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic camera built probably before 1970. It was first made in 1964.

When I walked out of that pawn shop with that camera, almost every little and significant event was documented with that camera. I considered asking if I could take it into bootcamp later. I never got proficient with the camera on a technical level, but I learned enough to take a decent picture. I was active so I got around and took a lot of pictures in various places. Most of the photos were Amateurish perhaps. It would take decades longer to learn about the rule of thirds and such. I just took pictures like a documentarian not an artist.

I was late in transitioning to digital. It may have been as late as 1996 or into the 2000s when I fiinally quit buying film, stopped developing rolls of film. In fact the last few rolls never got developed. At some point I put the camera down and picked up the canon powershot A30. The canon would travel with me farther and to more diverse places than the Pentax.

The pentax meant a lot to me. we had travelled many a mile being at my side for some wild days of youth. Many of my youthful memories would be lost if it wasn’t for that camera. Photography also drew me close to my friend Curt who also got hooked. He showed me how to take pictures of the night sky using a technique of setting the shutter speed to “M” and hold the shutter open with a locking device. Holding the shutter open over a long period of time allowed star light to enter as it slowly made a circuit. I was amazed at seeing a picture of stars having long tails. This worked with the moon. We experimented at night in fields and while camping.

My pentax, after decades of storage in a box, is a wreck. The black anodizing in many places has been rubbed off, mainly because I put a case around it that was too small. It would clamp shut but rubbed as it did no. And I always like a skinny strap. Add a few lenses, an extension tube, and a flash, and my ebay listing is complete. The extension tube is put between the 50mm lense and the camera body making the lense a microscope of sorts. With it I could take closeup picture of ants and what not. It worked great. I set the ebay price at just $25.99.