“And now for something completely different…”
I know. I just came out with a new novel in the very last days of 2025, and suddenly here’s another new book. But this one isn’t fiction. It’s kind of an autobiography, and kind of a picture book.
Wait. No. It’s a total picture book.
It’s about cameras.
Film cameras. Early digital cameras. Retro digital cameras. And all the pictures that they take. Or rather, pictures that I took. Me. I took all the pictures.
You see, when AI imagery first burst into the public eye, I played with it a lot. I was fascinated by it. And it got better. And better. And better. Then suddenly I realized something.
This isn’t just a neat new toy. It’s a problem.
Because now you don’t need a photographer or a camera to create an image. You just need to type. A lot. Or barely at all. You can be precise and wrestle with prompts for hours, or you can vaguely describe something and let the AI surprise you.
And yes, it is fun. But it’s still a problem.
The more I saw it that way, the more I gravitated back toward my original photography. Film. Analog cameras. The slow, physical, chemical process. The thing where light actually hits something real. And I wanted to get back to that.
So, in a surge of nostalgia, I began repurchasing the film cameras I’d worked with in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. But once I started, I didn’t want to stop. I began discovering other wonderful old cameras too. Ones I’d never been able to afford when they were new.
Now they’re relatively cheap. Very easy to find. Even working ones. And just like that, I had started a collection I never intended to start. A bunch of beautiful, weird, elegant old machines, each with its own personality. But it didn’t stop there.
Early digital cameras are what really brought me back into photography as a profession. They gave me freedom. Freedom from film, from cost, from delay. They changed the way I saw images. So I started collecting those too. And at some point I began writing blog posts about each camera. The experience of using it. What it felt like in my hands. What it made me want to shoot.
And then I stopped, and didn’t publish them, because I realized something else. These aren’t blog posts, they’re chapters of a book. A different kind of autobiography. A biography of the cameras themselves. What they were like when they were new. What they’re like now. And a visual record of what they see and what I saw then and now. Photographs from the 70s and 80s alongside photographs taken today with the same machines.
That realization is what gave birth to this book.