Monthly Archives: March 2025

 

You can register at the email address above and below, if you don’t send your request on the 9th of April you will most likely not get in!!!!!!!  This is an event I helped start over 30 years ago and it is a sell out every year!  If you’ve never been to Grandfather Mountain it’ s a must!  This is a great team of presenters and I know you will have a great time!  Hope to see you there!

 

grandfather.com/photography-weekend

 

Blessings,

 

the pilgrim

 

In the Mid Sixties, maybe 1966, I was a sophomore at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY, and I bought my first camera!  A Minolta Autopak 500,  it took 126 cartridge film and had a focusing knob on the side to select; Close, Group and Distance!  Through out my college days I shot hundreds of pictures of friends an events and chronicled my life!  I still have some of those prints!  The love for photography started right there!

 

After graduation from college I started teaching and had a little money and wanted a more serious camera!   I knew nothing about what was good so I picked the cheapest I could find from a New York camera store, can’t remember which one!?  I ordered a Kowa SET 2, it arrived broken and inoperable, after weeks of haggling I finally got it returned and my meager refund!

 

 

 

I lived in a small town in eastern Kentucky, Harlan, and I didn’t know anyone that could advice me, so I came up with a plan!!!???  I called three different camera store and asked which three camera brands they would recommend in my price range?  Between the three stores, all within a hundred miles of where I lived, for then, I’d had enough of New York camera stores!  So they recommended; Minolta, Pentax, Nikon and Canon.  Of the three stores all made different lists, but Nikon was in everyone’s list!  I figured if they all agreed on that one brand, maybe that was a good bet!

 

 

That turned out to be the right choice for me, I used Nik0n cameras for the next 43 years!!!!!  My first camera, the Nikkormat FTN with a Nikkor 50mm f 2 lens, cost me less that $200.  It was their least expensive camera but a rugged, capable camera that served me well!  I learned the basics of photography with that camera and shot tens of thousands of Color slides and Black and White negatives with it!!!!!  Sometime in the 1980’s I had a very unwise and short affair with a sweet little Konica camera, but it was short lived and Nikon and I were back together again quickly!  We all. make mistakes!

 

My long love affair with Nikon served me very well and in fact I ended up working for Nikon as their Nikon Professional Services Tech rep for the Southern U.S. for 11 years!  While working for Nikon I had rotator cuff surgery on my right shoulder and suffered through a long recovery!  During my recovery carrying and using Full Frame cameras from Nikon was a real burden so I needed a small easy to carry camera until I was fully recovered!?  While at the big photo expo in New York I browsed all the camera companies booths to see if anyone had something I might use until I was fully recovered!?  Fujifilm had a new. very compact but really wonderfully made. pocket-able camera called the X10!  It was perfect! I ordered one and kept it a secret!!!!!

 

 

 

An interesting thing happened, the camera was a joy to use, and the files were spectacular, I fell in love with the Fujifilm colors and this little jewel of a camera!  Over the winter I took it, hidden in a coat pocket, everywhere, when I shot shot these three images below, I was in love!!!!!!!

 

 

Shot in French Quarter of New Orleans on an early morning!

 

One of my favorite car shots from Old Car City.

 

My favorite portrait shot of the late, great Dr. Charles Stanley!

 

The bottom line is that I fell in love with the Fujifilm colors, glass and the system, so much so, that after retiring from Nikon I became an X-Photographer for Fujifilm!  I have owned tons of Fujifilm gear, and still do!  I still have and carry my X10 too!  I’ve used lots of photo gear and have loved it all and I still have very good memories of my Nikon days, but for my age and stage of photography I’m using what works best for me, right now!  After all they are tools, and what matters is who is using the tools and what they produce, not who made them!!!!!!

 

Blessings, and happy shooting,

 

the pilgrim