A Twenty-Year Friendship

The year was 2007, I was a college student working towards a bachelor of fine arts with a concentration in photography. I was living,  breathing, and absorbing all things Art and Photography. A year or so previously, at the well-meaning advice of my Photo 101 Professor, I had purchased a brand new, out of the box, shiny Pentax 35mm camera with a thirty-five-to-something zoom lens. It was a solid, manual functioning, student camera that would serve me well.

But then…across a crowded room, my eyes fell upon this beauty and the wheels of destiny achingly began to turn. Time stood still, my heart skipped a beat, and everything changed. I had to look my bright-eyed young Pentax in the eye and heartlessly break the news: “Sorry, I’ve met someone else. Someone with depth and soul. Farewell and adieu…to Amazon marketplace with you.”

This someone else was well used but cared for Ricoh KR-10 Super fitted with a 50mm f/2 prime lens and a gorgeous retro strap. This camera was produced during the same decade I had been—the 1980s—and so there we were, members of the same generation, both enjoying our twenties together and ready to conquer the world with photography. 

The Ricoh KR-10 Super

Nearly twenty years late, now both hitting forty years of age, we are still together, still filling the world with images, though harboring fewer illusions about the “conquering” part. Over these twenty years I have never purchased any lens for this camera besides the 50mm prime that was on it during our first encounter, and that delightful, colorful retro strap is still attached. Why change an arrangement that is just perfect?

However, after twenty years of bliss and not a single missed click, tragedy struck. The film advance and shutter cocking mechanism on my beloved Ricoh KR10 Super jammed. Oh, the horror! Once again, the world stood still, hearts stopped, Et Cetera. Was the world about to change once again, this time for the worse? Had the swan song for my longest standing photographic companion come at last?

But a friendship of this length and beauty does not come to an untimely end simply because of a few jammed gears. Doggedly, I refused to accept the dictates of fate and aged tech, and got to work. 

So there we were, two-AM on a Tuesday as midnight storms swirled around us. I spread a towel over the table, pulled out my set of miniature screwdrivers, some needle nose pliers, and fitted my watchmaker‘s loupe to my eye (I actually do not own a watchmaker‘s loupe, but this scene is so much cooler if I am wearing one). 

After gently removing the bottom plate from the camera, revealing the inner workings of the film advance and shutter winding mechanisms I sat there staring at the guts of my dear friend, helpless on the operating table, for what seemed like, at least, it had to be…a few minutes. After making some very uneducated guesses about which little metal part tripped and triggered which other little metal part and which one was not tripping and triggering its neighbors in the way the good lord and a team of Japanese engineers intended, I went to work. At some point, I got up and made myself a cappuccino. I deemed this absolutely necessary for the well-being of my camera, the world, and the universe in general.

Long story short, through some miracle of pretending that I knew what I was doing, the film advanced, the shutter clicked, and my dear friend once more stood up and joined me on our picture making adventures. 

Here’s to many more years and rolls of film!