Today would have been my mother's 81st birthday. She passed away in the beginning of May 2014 just a few weeks shy of her 78th birthday. The last three advents of May the 26th had been challenging to say the least, but this year, I had elected to spend it a bit differently. At nearly the last minute, I'd elected to begin a new tradition of sorts,
My mother enjoyed photography in much the same way as I do, But while I've always enjoyed approaching photography from new angles, armed with a varied plethora of different photographic devices, she remained fiercely loyal to a single photographic companion - her Kodak Instamatic X-35.
Nearly all of the photographic memories of my childhood were taken through the lens of this basic camera, and while I never recall seeing any photos from this camera that stun me with magnificent sharpness or phenomenal bokeh, the small plastic camera did its job of recording family memories for decades. My mother's loyalty to this camera was so great that she simply stopped taking photos when the availability of 126 film in local stores dried up in the mid-1990's, despite me getting her what I thought was a perfectly suitable easy-loading Pentax replacement in 35mm format.
A few days prior to the advent of this day, I had been browsing about a few camera articles online when I happened upon a site that detailed some of the more "up-market" offerings in the 126 format, and within a few days, had elected to give one of the cameras featured on this page a try. My "Why not?" moment for 126 was soon answered by the Ricoh 126C-Flex.
The 126-C Flex seems to be a marriage of parts from the TLS lineup of 35mm SLR cameras and the earlier Ricohflex 35 leaf shutter SLR cameras. The 55mm f/2.8 lens seems to be the same as that on the Ricohflex, and provides a mild portrait/telephoto perspective for the smaller 126 format.
