When I was in high school my parents used to go to a lot of estate auctions. These auctions often featured boxed full of assorted stuff sold as single item. If you wanted one or two of the items you had to buy the whole box. My parents bought one such "grab bag" for some reason and found several cameras among the things they didn't want. One of these was an actual 35mm camera(!) and they gave it to me. The camera was a Universal Camera Corporation "Mercury II", a truly bizarre, slightly-more-than-half-frame (it got about 40 shots on a 24-exposure roll) device. It was my first experience with a camera with adjustable shutter speed and aperture. That and a B&W darkroom calss is school got me hooked.
Next, I started coveting a 35mm SLR but the only things I could afford were truly junky. Then a store nearby had a sale on a Pentax K100 with 55mm f2.0 lens. It was still a little more expensive than the rubbish I'd been considering, but my parents loaned/gave me the extra money I needed and I was off. I still have two of the cameras from the auction collection, by the way: The Mercury II and a really cheesy Kodak TLR that I never even tried to use. -- Mark Roberts www.robertstech.com Photorgaphy and writing
