Camera Crazy

Last updated on 9/14/2026

It happens to all photographers… I get the new-equipment bug really bad. I start looking around and I find boxes full of old lenses and 8mm movie cameras on the closet shelf that I haven’t used in a decade.

Off to Photo-Rama I go. This is a cool little off-shoot of photography that you don’t hear too much about. It’s kinda like the used car lot of cameras – buy, sell, swap, collect ’em all. Leicas, Nikons, Pentax, lenses bigger than baseball bats. If you’re looking for a plexiglass case for your 1923 WhatsoMatic or a fish-eye for your new LectricFlex, it’s all there. Get out the checkbook and get ready to haggle like a Persian rug vendor.

I make my way slowly around the floor with a Graflex that’s older than I am. Start out at $400 – HA HA! $350 – still no action. $300 – the guy actually SMELLS the camera for some reason. Finally I get a taker at $250. The free market works one more time! I look all beaten-down and dejected so the guy thinks he’s gettin’ the best of me. Once I turn my back, though… HEE HEE, my heels click together in mid-air and I scamper out to the car for the next load of antiques.

Discover the value of name-brands… the Nikon equipment goes fast and for a surprising buck. Get $20 for a Super 8 movie camera… try that at your local flea market. Guy from Detroit buys all my brand-X stuff, says he specializes in low-budget glass. Whatever, but I walk out of the photo-bazaar with enough dinero to buy something brand new. YAHOO!

Photography isn’t quite the popular hobby it used to be, and one way you can tell is the waning production values for these shows. They used to book into splashy meeting rooms at the Holiday Inn. Major manufacturers would show up with demos of the latest and greatest. There’d be a beauty queen under some lights with a beach movie back drop and a thousand hound-dogs clickin’ away like mad making The Shot Of The Year. Now they’re in a leaky 4H barn at the fairgrounds in the middle of the winter. You have to slog through the mud to get in the door, the hot dogs cost $7 and no self-respecting beauty queen would be caught dead within miles of the place.

The self-help gurus tell us that when you reach a certain point in life, you stop acquiring things and start divesting. It’s like a high-water point of materialism – you start out with nothing and end up with nothing and somewhere in between you get as much stuff as you can handle. I’m starting to see the attraction of less stuff, especially in the gear-happy area of photography. More and more I realize the point is making the shot, not filling shelves with expensive stuff. It feels like it’s time to generalize this concept for use in the rest of my life.