aleo recently asked me about getting a camera, like a real one. i think something at school spawned this conversation. i told him if he was serious he should learn how to shoot for real. by this i meant manually, where he controlled all of the settings himself (eg. shot speed, aperture, focus). the closest thing to an electronic aid would be the light meter which is nothing more than a bar the moves up and down on the right hand side of the viewfinder you see when framing your shot. we went to the basement and dug out my old film camera.

this was the used camera marty bought me for christmas one year when we were dating.

this was the camera i learned to shoot on, my training coming from marty's father, papa ken.

this was the camera i took over 1,000 pictures on in italy (a few of which can be seen here).

bella was conceived on that trip to italy.

her conception and those 1k photos is what led me to a digital camera because i knew i would never be able to afford all the film i would surely be shooting of my first born.

the camera has been mothballed in the basement since that time.

until last month when alex asked about it. then we dug the camera out, cleaned it up, and got him a couple rolls of film. i explained the basics behind it all to him and turned him loose.

a few days later he came to me and handed me his four rolls of film. after they were developed, we both were quite eager to see how he did. upon returning home from the film store after picking up his developed film, i placed the disc in my laptop drive, navigated to the photo files and clicked on the first one. the above photo filled my screen. i just started laughing. alex was very confused by my hysterics. once i settled down i told him that i did not expect the first ever picture i ever saw him take, using a fully manual camera, to be that good. there were others but i was very proud of my young man's eye and ability to execute so fast out of the gate.