I Gave My Four-Year-Old an Old Fujifilm Camera

Recently my youngest son found an old Kodak point and shoot camera from roughly 2005. This camera is from the era when most digital cameras took standard AA batteries, but didn’t use them efficiently and burns through a pair in approximately 36 minutes of use. For the health of my battery drawer, I had to retire this camera and come up with some other way to satisfy his budding creative urges. 

Coincidentally, a friend of mine asked me for a senior portrait session for her daughter. After I came to grips with the fact I have a friend with a child that is a senior is high school, I started packing up my gear. It was then that I remembered that I still had my original Fujifilm X-T1 from my conversion away from Canon, and I still had plenty of (rechargeable!!!) batteries for it. 

I thought to myself “Self, you should charge a battery, slap a lens on this, and give it to the boy while we’re out there shooting those senior portraits”

That’s exactly what I did. I set all exposure settings to auto, gave him a rundown on how to push the shutter button, and let him go. 

Here is a curated collection of his early works:

And a little peak on the other end of the camera