Werner Bio

I've only had 4 cams in my life - and none was one of those automatic-pocket-cams that got popular when I was young.

The first cam my dad gave me was his old one. I was about 10 years old and I guess I was the only student in my class who knew anything about aperture and shutter speed :-) It was an "AGFA Selectronic S" (for pics of the cam please refer to "Google"), you had to estimate the distance and choose an aperture (2,8-22 German scale) and the cam then "automatically" chose the respective shutter speed (fastest speed: 1/500 sec). No autofocus, no mirror-reflex, no special features at all - but I loved it and managed to take some decent holiday-shots.

After a few years my dad bought another new cam and I again got his old one - a Canon AE1. With that one it was the other way round: Choose a shutter speed and it will give you the corresponding aperture. Being a mirror-reflex made it even more easy to take pictures, even though there still wasn't any autofocus involved. Unfortunately I left it at the Trevi-Fountain in Rome and when I noticed and went back it was already gone :-(

That meant that I was without a cam for a while - until my husband bought a Canon EOS 600. I have to admit that being able to switch it to full-automatic-mode (of course including autofocus) made me forget a lot about aperture and shutter speed. It's a brilliant cam for holiday-, party- and "Johnnie"-shots - and that's what I used it for most of the time. I never thought about experimenting a lot, because I was too lazy to buy films for that purpose and getting those pics developed in my opinion always took way too long anyway. I'm a curious person and would have loved to see the results instantly…

Even though I'm the curious one it was my husband who started talking about a digital cam in 2002. Oh, that reminds me that there was another cam in my life, which was actually supposed to be a webcam, but you could also take 640x480-shots as well. The quality was very poor and very dependent on the light around, but I liked taking Johnnie-snaps and seeing the result at once. Still I didn't think we really needed a digital cam, because I though that the Canon was just as good. Anyway we bought a Fuji Finepix S304 for Christmas 2002 - and since then the Canon has never been touched again :-) What I like about the digital cam is that besides being able to see instant results, you can take as many pics as you like without any extra-costs. If they turn out terrible, you just delete them. Of course the possibility to alter them with your pc is another brilliant thing. I've found out that merely putting a frame around an image can add quite a lot :-) Sometimes I wish there were some more "manual" features included with this cam, but since I was the one who didn't want it at all in the first place I don't want to complain - and neither my husband nor I would have thought that the cam would be used that frequently anyway.