Michael P. Young Blog: My First Camera...

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Holy cow! I was going through an old "memory box" and found a Christmas picture from my youth, taken by one of my sisters. In it was a snap of me and my very fist camera (the box on the left). It was a Keystone Everflash XR108 that took 110 film...

As I sit here and look at this picture, I'm reminded of what an anal retentive weirdo I was growing up (some will say I'm still a weirdo with a good measure of anal retentive still lingering). It was also the same Christmas I got a Firefox remote control truck! Being the freak that I was back then,
I refused to sleep in a bed...slept on the floor (it wasn't until 8th grade when I finally slept in my bed). When I went to sleep that night, I laid out all my Christmas gifts around my bedding nice and neat, and had my sister take a picture of the scene so I could memorialize the bestest Christmas ever! I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it.

That following summer, my father got to be part of a summer foreign exchange program with the company for which he worked. As part of the deal he got to take his family with him. So I loaded up on 110 film, and packed my suitcase as only a good little type A boy could.

While in France, mom and dad made sure we spent plenty of time exploring and visiting all the cool places near and far. I kept a journal of the summer and took many pictures. In that same memory box were the prints of some of the photos I took that summer. However, somewhere along the way, I shed some of that anal retentive type A and lost the negatives. So I took it upon myself to scan the photos. France was really a magical kingdom of places to visit.

Fontain Bleaue