Day 40 - I spent a lot of time today scanning slides from my mother's trove. As mentioned before many of these are 126 film size which gives a 26mm square frame. I have mentioned before that I am so disappointed at the lack of photographic skill demonstrated in most of the photos. We used several Instamatic cameras over the years. I had an Instamatic 100 (the first) which I took with me to the World's Fair in 1965 during my week there with the Boy Scout Service Corps. There was no adjustment of shutter or aperture, except that deploying the flash changed the shutter from 1/90 to 1/40. Here are some specs I found:

Manufactured: 1963-66
Lens: f/11, 43 mm
Optics: plastic, single element, meniscus
Focus: fixed, 4 feet to infinity
Shutter: 1/90 second or 1/40 second with flash deployed
Tripod Mount: none
Modern Film Speeds: 100, 200, 400 on a sunny f/16 day

Flash range: 4 feet to 7 feet with AG1B blue bulbs, 10 feet with AG1 clear bulbs
Batteries: two AAA only required for flash
Viewfinder: direct view

I think we mostly shot Kodachrome which might have been ASA 100, certainly not faster. Might have even been ASA 64, but I just don't remember.

I can understand that taking photos at the time was really incidental to whatever was going on. Somehow we all had the feeling that if you point the camera in the right direction and push the shutter you will get a good result. Boy were we wrong. We just didn't learn from our experiences, either.

My photography took a giant turn for the better once I got a real SLR and started shooting Tri-X and developing the film right away in the high school photo lab. I started experimenting with flash and strobes, thinking about DOF and thinking a lot more about exposure and lighting.

We have it great nowdays because of the instantaneous feedback of looking at the screen on the back of the camera or on your smart phone. Still, there are many out there who post terrible, both artistic and technical, photos. That makes one think that maybe those red hued grainy selfies are the new normal. NOT! One can coax very nice photos out of a smart phone if you put your mind to it.