About Mercury Photo Bureau

My Brief Life As a Photographer

[Sidenote:

Publisher, cor­re­spon­dent, author, pho­tog­ra­pher and dogs­body.]

My My name is Chris J. Zähller, and my 1^st cam­era was a mail-order Kodak 110 Instamatic pocket film cam­era with a “stick” flash pur­chased by sav­ing proofs-of-pur­chase from my mom’s fem­i­nine hygiene prod­ucts. My 2^nd cam­era was my mom’s hand-me-down Polaroid Land cam­era. I used a film SLR for a class assign­ment in the early 1980s, then didn’t pick up another cam­era for a decade-and-a-half when I bought a Canon Elph APS cam­era in the 1990s.

After that, I inher­ited a cou­ple of my brother’s cast-off dig­i­tal point & shoots. They were okay, but noth­ing about them made me want to spend my vaca­tion with a cam­era in front of my face when I could just be enjoy­ing the sights unen­cum­bered. Then some­thing hap­pened … to find out what, read my 1^st essay.

— Chris J. Zähller