My Journey

One of the weird things about a consumerist society is that a product is never simply pronounced 'mature' or 'completed.'

A case in point is the bicycle. By the 1980s the chromoly ten speed was perfected. Bikes were lightweight, the frame geometry was excellent, and the engineering in the derailleurs meant smooth shifting for years and years. Nobody ever rode a Univega or Puch and said, 'Golly whiz, I just wish I had more.' When it came to bicycles the job was done.

This is a problem for manufacturers. They constantly have to improve and sell the next thing and so they cook up a story like, 'An aluminum frame is lighter.' Right. I have an aluminum Trek and it weighs much more my Univega does. How about carbon fiber? Okay I guess. If you want to risk a fork snapping in half so that you could potentially go that extra mile nobody was looking for.

Today at lunch I decided fill up some water jugs at the natural grocer and check a couple of thrift stores for goodies.

Honestly, I was hoping to find some old digicams that I could give to the kids so that they could do a bit of point and shoot at the zoo. But when I started digging through the cases at the front of the store I was in for a huge suprprise.

First I found a Minolta MC mega zoom lens. This thing looked like a bazooka. It was pretty clear from what I could tell but it looked neglected and I didn't want to take a risk that it had fungus so I moved on from it. It was only $8 so I'm still kind of torn on that one.

Not long ago my oldest son came to me and said that he would like to explore photography. So I decided to go about some thrift shops to see if I could find an older solid DSLR for him.

The whole family packed into the car and we drove all over the city going from pawn shop to pawn shop, thrift store to thrift store. And the majority of what I found was old 'entry' cameras. Canon Rebel and that sort of thing. Nothing wrong with that but it just wasn't what I was after.

Towards the end of the day we came up on a thrift store situated right next to a BBQ joint. It was the perfect combination.