Instamatic

It was not that kind of thing.

I was armed with a pen, a notepad and an Instamatic camera.

Wow.

And so what we did is, is because I, I couldn't shoot video and do that kind of thing.

The reporters were not allowed to, but the military police and the fire people had.

We had all those little Instamatic cameras, you know, those little cardboard cameras.

We all brought those in.

So I have some really interesting pictures of the entire My entire, some of my entire time down there, one of the most amazing in my little portfolio is a couple pictures of fire engines that were reduced to the size of Volkswagen Beetles.

And my mom and dad, you know, they put the kibosh on that and it was like, okay, no, we can't keep paying for all of this.

So, you know, I would try to save money best I could, do an extra grass cutting or whatever so as to make money so as I could take pictures with my little cool Kodak Instamatic drop-in 126 camera.

Anyway, so that went on like that for a bunch of years, but just for what it's worth, Maybe I'm just a thinking person or maybe I was just a thinking person when I was younger, but I remember definitively looking at this camera and noticing that this hole takes the picture, but this hole right here It is the one you look through.

And I remember thinking, I mean, how is that? You know, I mean, how do I adjust for that? Or should I adjust for that? And I just remember thinking about all those kinds of things.

wouldn't get away with that today, but there was a 60 minute documentary on this one photographer and he had really thick glasses, horrible eyesight.

And he was using a little 35 millimeter Instamatic camera.

And all these other guys had the great big lenses and the latest and greatest technology.

And the whole story was that he said, it's not, it's not the tool, it's who's using the tool that makes the difference.

It was just like one.

And it was the kind of like, you know, the Kodak Instamatic that you had to have the film developed and stuff.

That was it.

And it wasn't like an annual tradition or a big production like it is now now.

Well, I actually ended up photographing like 700 weddings.

And my first experience with photography was photographing a concert that my mom gave me her Kodak Instamatic.

And I went to see David Bowie.

And I can tell you briefly, I was sitting up in the second tier for my siblings, and I walked all the way down to the front row, and no guard, usher, they didn't ask me for a ticket at all.

Film and camera sales provided most of Kodak's top line while processing services generated a steady margin.

The company invested heavily in R&D for new film grades, color accuracy, and compact designs like the Brownie and Instamatic.

This dominance made competitors think less about disrupting the system.

In the mid nineteen seventies, Kodak engineers built what would be the first self-contained digital camera.

The only other thing that just pops to mind was it was, it was, I felt like it was extra.

I did a report on Thomas Edison and we had been to the Edison Museum and I with my Instamatic camera had taken pictures.

So I attached pictures to the report.

And would say, here's the phonograph.

They sold programs, but I wanted something to remember the night by.

And, uh, so I, I would generally get an autograph the first few times I went, but then I thought, you know, uh, we, we had pretty much second row ringside seats, uh, for these matches and, uh, I thought, "Oh, I, I could take some..." Just, uh, Ko- Kodak Instamatic pictures of [laughs] these at the time.

Yeah.

And, uh- And just to have something to remember it by.