During Christmas of 1971, I got my first camera – a Kodak Instamatic X15 (the box is visible in the background of one of the images). Most of the pictures taken by this camera have been lost over the years, but there is one album that (mostly) survived, despite being made of acid-washed paper. Only some of the pictures were captioned, and some of the dates can’t be right given when the camera appeared, but family histories and historical realities are often at odds- who am I to argue with my younger self?
The Instamatic X15 used 126 film, producing square images. There are some shots at the end from Christmas of 1974, when I got my second camera, another instamatic which used rectangular 110 film. All the images in this gallery were digitized using a Kodak i1210 scanner.
For their common birthday this year, Kade and Sierra are getting child digital cameras made by Fisher Price. These are designed to have Instamatic simplicity but the instant gratification of digital; it will be interesting to see how well this really works.