Back to the closet for the old GAF

Two months ago I gave up the ghost on film photography and bought a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera.

That means an old friend has been retired to the top shelf of the hall closet.

The old friend is a GAF L-CM camera that I bought in 1976. The thing is as heavy as a tank and almost as tough. It will be a long time before a digital camera can take the abuse this old film camera did, and it will be a long time before a digital camera teaches me as much about photography as the old GAF did.

I was just out of college and trying to get a career in journalism started. I figured I needed to learn to use a camera, so I went to a camera store and bought the most affordable good camera they had. It was all manual -- nothing automatic at all. Once I unpacked the box, I went to the library and checked out the Kodak book "How to Make Good Pictures." That book explained shutter speed, aperture, depth of field, the rule of thirds and all the other things a beginning photographer needs to know.

That summer, I shot black and white film. Those were the days before one-hour developing. In fact, about the quickest you could get your film back from the lab was a week. That fall, I bought my first roll of color print film. That winter, I experimented with a roll of infrared black-and-white. By spring, I was into color transparencies (slides).

The old GAF went with me to Florida, to California and behind the Iron Curtain. It accompanied me on the trip in 1986 when I drove both sides of the Ohio River. I used it to shoot pictures that moved on AP and UPI.

Did I say it was rugged? I was walking on the boulders near the Gallipolis Locks and Dam when I dropped the GAF. It landed on the edge of a rock and dented the bottom of the camera body. The dent went all the way to the film door. But there was no damage to the electrical exposure meter inside, and the film door closed as good as always.

A similar but smaller ding to a Nikon FM-2 a few years later knocked out the electronic exposure meter and required a $200 repair job.

As rugged and as instructional as it was, the GAF had its faults. By modern standards, the viewfinder was dark. And it got darker the more the lens was stopped down. And the lens mount was frustrating. You know how most SLRs require a one-eighth twist to get the lens off? The GAF has a screw mount lens. Changing from the 50-mm lens to a zoom lens required three complete revolutions.

But the old thing took abuse and lasted. But its time is past. Digital is here. From what I read, I'll be lucky to get the same 30 years out of my DSLR that I got out of the old GAF. I hear the shutters of digitals wear out sooner than shutters of film cameras. And who knows how long the software in my camera will interface with the software of my home computer. The computer industry learned a great lesson from 1950s Detroit about planned obsolescence.

But you know what? While it may be obsolete from a marketing and convenience standpoint, it still gets the job done after all these years, like that old-tech Jeep Cherokee of mine that was totaled in a wreck back in October. It, too, used an old engine and everything else of old design, but it was still running at 217,000 miles when the accident happened.

Maybe someday I'll feel like shooting a roll of film again. When that happens, I'll reach up in the top of the closet, grab the GAF and load film and start shooting. I bet it will still work.