I got my first camera, a Canon Powershot SD1000, as a Christmas present when I was in Grade 12. I don’t remember if I asked specifically for a camera or if my parents just decided to buy it for me. In either case, I can say that in hindsight, it’s the best Christmas present I ever received.
I took it with me to school every day – I have so many photos of me and my friends to prove it. We took selfies in class, years before the term “selfie” ever existed. We took silly photos in front of the school for hours in the freezing cold. We took photos everywhere, and it’s a big part of why my last year of high school was so memorable.
It was around the same time that cameras in cell phones started to become popular. I felt so superior to have an actual camera. Camera phones (which is what we called them before every cell phone had a camera) used to take terrible, low resolution photos. Though when I look back at the photos I took, I realize so many of them are ruined by camera shake. At the time I didn’t care (or more likely, didn’t notice). I know for sure that many of these blurry, out-of-focus shots made it to Facebook. And blurry or not, they were way better than those tiny cell phone pics.
Nowadays, I carry around my DSLR. My Nikon D5500 takes much better photos, and I’m far more competent with it than I was with my Powershot (which didn’t even have a manual mode), but I don’t think I can ever recapture the same joy I felt taking photos with my very first camera.