Back when I was a kid, dad would take out his camera and snap pictures of the family seemingly all the time. It probably really wasn’t that many shots but you know how it is–when you are a kid, 2 minutes is the equivalent of 2 days. Anyway, he’d take them down to the drug-store/pharmacy (chemist for you Brits out there), get them developed, bring them home and we’d all sit on the sofa and look them over. He used a Kodak 35mm range-finder similar, if not identical, to this one:
It was completely manual. No built-in meter, no automatic anything. The user had to select f/stop, shutter-speed, and I want to say approximate distance for a focus. To me, it was magical. I never saw a single photo that was out-of-focus, over-exposed or under-exposed. (For all I know, he took those out of the envelope after picking them up at the drugstore). And while they were always black-n-white, the details captured always amazed me. All from a camera that he got when he was in Japan at the end of the Korean war. He once told me what he paid for it and it seemed like a small fortune to me (maybe $20–of course that was in early 1950’s dollars). As far as I know, he still has that camera.
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I really began to get interested in this magic called photography (who was it? Oh yeah, Arthur C. Clarke is quoted as saying, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”). I tried using dad’s camera and I even tried his father’s old Twin Reflex. I’d like to report that the results would have rivaled Ansel Adams but that would be really stretching the truth well beyond the breaking point. No, the early photos were pretty much a disaster. But I was learning. 
Then Lakeside Camera opened its doors In Metairie, La. I want to say this was around 1972-73. Anyway, I would stop by there every chance I could, pestering the sales guys on what would be the best SLR to get. Naturally, they initially steered me to the big guns, Nikon or Canon. After I a few visits I finally had the guts to explain that I only had about $200 so a Nikon or Canon was WAY out of my reach at the moment. Rather than blow me off, the owner showed me a new SLR that had only recently been introduced–Mamiya-Sekor 1000
(Read about this no-nonsense tank of a camera here). He showed me how well it was constructed, how it had a new, dual-metering system, yada, yada, yada. (I had kinda tuned him out at the “Mamiya-Sekor” part. Who? 1000 what? Never heard of them. Was he trying to sell me a piece of junk? He seemed like such a nice guy too.) Once he stopped to take a breath, I politely told him I’d have to think about it and get back to him.
So $200 (it may have been a bit less but let’s round up to this to make the math easy) was a HUGE amount of money to me back then. My “job” was cutting grass at $20-30/yard. Hmmm, 10 yards at $20/per. I could do that. Might take me a few months since I only had 2 or three regular customers and I split the take with my buddy/partner. So it was more like 20 yards at $10/per. Two yards a week. Average 4 weeks in a month. Figure 3-4 months ’cause I had to have SOME spending money. Okay, it was do-able. Now let’s jump to 2013 and put this into a more modern perspective. $20 in 1973 dollars, according to Dollartimes.com is approximately equal to $108.00 today. Would you pay some gangly teenager $100/week to cut your grass? Didn’t think so. Turns out I was making pretty good money–just didn’t seem like it at the time. That $200 price-tag on the camera? That is roughly equivalent to $1080 in today’s dollars! Which brings us, finally, to the point of today’s post.
I’ve been wanting to get back into photography. Still photography. I have a pretty good video camera (Canon Vixia HF-M301). But I miss doing stills. Portraits, landscapes, animals, grand-kids, etc. So the last few months I started to seriously look at a DSLR (Digigal Single-Lens Reflex). Specifically, the Nikon D5200 24.1 MP CMOS Digital SLR with 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 AF-S DX VR NIKKOR Zoom Lens (Black)
. To say I got a little shell-shocked by the prices is an understatement. I found decent systems from $3-400 dollars to thousands. And when I say thousands I’m talking $4-5K for a body and an “ok” kit-lens. Wow. I was blown away. It was looking like I was going to have to spend close to $1000.00 (sound familiar?) to get what I would consider a decent camera. Something that would “grow” with me as I got better at taking pictures.
How could this be? Can it really be that expensive to get into digital photography? Oh, sure there are simpler, cheaper “pocket” cameras that take excellent pictures for $2-300. But I have a “pocket” camera (a Nikon Cool Pix S200). It takes really good photos. I wanted “more power”. Yeah, yeah. It’s the photographer, not the camera that takes the picture. Yeah, I’ve heard all that and have spouted those same words and phrases myself. Then I had an epiphany. Or maybe it was bad sausage. I was thinking in mid to late ’70s dollars. NOT, modern, 2013 dollars! From that perspective, prices began to make sense.
That Mamiya-Sekor 1000 (which I did end up buying) is today’s equivalent to a Nikon D5200 or Canon T4i (both close to $1000.00) So, if I was to buy that D5200
or even it’s older brother, the D5100, it would be like buying that Mamiya-Sekor 1000 in 1973! I would be spending about the same amount of money! And if I was to buy the equivalent of the Olympus OM-1 setup, i.e., camera, lenses, flash, etc., that I had in 1977, I would need to spend about $3200 in 2013 dollars. Not too bad really. Actually, getting into DSLR photography could be less expensive than getting into 35mm SLRs. $800-1000 2013 dollars works out to about $150-190 1973 dollars. And I get more camera for that price than either the Mamiya-Sekor or the Olympus OM-1. In 2013 that is.
“Hey, honey? Where’s the checkbook????”