What is your 'camera for life'?

[Pioneer]

I am not real clear on what part of this is so bizarre. I guess I look at this subject a little bit differently. I was 22 years old when my wife and I were married. In just a few months we will have been married for 50 years. A large percentage of our entire married life has been recorded on film that was exposed in a 35mm SLR that I bought about two years or so after we were married. I still own that camera and the 50mm lens that came with it and I still use it regularly. It has never failed to take pictures when I needed them. Sometimes I didn't do so well but that camera has recorded a LOT of our lives together. Children, houses, vacations, graduations, sporting events, cross-country moves, injuries, cars and on and on. If there is one camera in my life that qualifies as my "Camera for Life" it is that humble Pentax K1000 that I picked up at a pawn shop in Minneapolis in the late 70s. I have bought, owned and sold a lot of cameras between now and then, and still do, but I still carry that poor little K1000 around with me regularly and I have no intention of ever getting rid of it. I have sent it in for cleaning and lubrication to Eric one time in that entire time period so I think I can absolutely testify that it is the most reliable camera I have ever owned.

 

[Godfrey]

This is exactly what I was thinking when looking at the posts of @Erik van Straten , which prompted this latest train of thought. He uses a handful of film cameras and lenses which are decades old, and he produces a very classic look in everything. When I look back through my flickr, I can see when I changed cameras, when I experimented with Lightroom presets and processing styles, when major upgrades resulted in large differences in output. Erik's work is pretty much timeless.

The basic thema in my work hasn't changed in decades, and I'm happy with it. So I rarely look at new gear to open new horizons in image making ... I think that's more a thing I did when I was a lot younger, and my seeing not as, um, mature as it is now. 😉

G