thedailypic•Yr5•038/365•1499•The Family

A suggestion I had for the 1500th photo was a photo of my cameras. Well these are the main tools I used over the last 4+ years, along with a pocket Sony RX100, which took these shots. I credit Paul Simon and an incredible woman named Ronny for this photo. I always wanted a Nikon, the song Kodachrome told me I did, but when I was younger I could not afford or justify spending the money.  My film set up throughout the early years were Minolta products, so when digital SLRs showed up it made sense to stay with them. I had lenses, flashes and accessories that all would be compatible. Slowly I was given reasons to move away from Minolta, first they merged with Konica and the products started to cheapen, then they were acquired by Sony… I hate Sony – horrible customer service.  Then, at a family wedding I watched in horror as my toddler son pulled my camera off a window sill and it bounced off the floor, it was never right again.  I sent the body and lens back to Sony a few times, each time it came back still broken. Out of focus, intermittent response, incredibly frustrating. I sold off the lenses and flashes and tossed the rest in a closet.

A couple years later I was ready to buy new stuff.  Plenty of friends pointed me towards Cannon, but I was set on finally getting my Nikon. I had some money and a clean slate, no loyalty or lenses holding me to any one brand. There was a fellow photographer at my Staples corp job who became a great friend, we would book “meetings” every now and then to scroll through sites or look in the B&H catalog or just talk about photography. Though a few years younger, Ronny knew her stuff, she tried to convince me to buy a used D200 or a new at the time D300 – she insisted I would out grow anything lower, but I was not ready to drop the money on something that expensive yet. I ended up with the D80, and it was a great camera for me at that moment. The dailypic project was started with the D80, but it was not long before I ended up with a D300s – 135 days into the project.  By then my friend Ronny had quit Staples, she left the corporate world and went off to live her dream to become a professional photographer and start her family. She also had a resurgence of cancer she had successful overcome when she was younger. Ronny would pass away a year after I bought that camera, but not before she would take the opportunity to say “I told you so” when I admitted I out grew the D80.  When I think about these early cameras, I think of Ronny and those meeting we would have about photography and our dreams. She saw the start of this project, she would send me quick notes on shots she really liked. I remember some wise ass comment she had on a photo I had called “Mother-ship at Dusk” day #48.  It was a picture I took of the Staples headquarters in Framingham, MA, the very place we would have those meetings. Her note was a string of unflattering, unprintable words about the building and some of the people in it, that just went on and on and on, and ended with “but the picture is nice”. Man, I miss Ronny. I would love to tell her I finally listened and got a tool I can grow with instead of out grow this year in my D4.  It only took 3 tries to get it right. We all need people like Ronny in our lives. The mother-ship is below.

tr/trp