I don't believe in reincarnation.  Surprisingly though, I did have a "past life".

In that past life, I was shooting tons of pics.

I started out at the age of six when rummaging through some old stuff in my lolo's house, I stumbled upon an old Ansco box camera.  I brought it home and asked my dad's mainstay photographer in his design studio to get some film for it.  The little box camera loaded up with 127 spool film.  And this is where it all began.  My love affair for the camera.

A year later, I again unearthed another toy.  It was a plastic camera which came in the shape of an SLR but instead of having a pentaprism on the top, it had a peephole from where to view the subjects.  The cool thing about this toy camera was that it loaded up with real 120 roll film!  This was my earliest brush with medium format photography.

In 1977, there was one short-lived TV show which perhaps molded my fascination for photography.  It was "James at 15".  It was  about  a teenage boy's coming of age. The series begins in Boston, where James (Lance Kerwin) and his family have moved from rural Oregon. Among its many scenes, James was portrayed as this camera-toting teenager who developed his own film and printed his own photos in a darkroom under the stairs.

Being the impressionable youth that I was, I wanted to be James.  Period.

Being James wasn't fully realized until my first year in college.  My dad had passed away and bequeathed to me were 2 SLRs.  A Ricoh and a Minolta.  It was fun having these but then life did not seem complete without having my own Nikon.  So before I stepped into my second year in college, I borrowed money from my mom to buy my 'dream camera' - a Nikon F3.

In New York, I told the Indian fellow tending the shop that I wanted a Nikon F3.  He advised me not to get one but to get a Nikon FA instead.  I heeded his advise and never regretted taking it.  F3s were eventually known to have problematic shutters.  The FA on the other hand is the grand-daddy of present day Multi-Mode cameras.  In those days, it was either you had an aperture priority camera or a shutter priority camera.  The Nikon FA broke the barriers by being the first all-in-one camera.  So, if you see those P, S, A, M letters on your camera, just remember...they all sprang from the FA.

Happy with the purchase of an FA and armed with a 28-210mm lens which was such a sensation in 1986 when zoom lenses were only spanning 35-135mm, I became the stereotypical Fine Arts student continually lugging a Nikon to college every day.

Finally, I was James.

(to be continued)