Remember when???

j-bird

Well-Known Member
So Native posted a pic of an old computer program from 1990 with a 5" floppy disk and it got me to thinking about my first trail cam...I'm thinking this is roughly mid 90's. I figure some of you guys have some older than this...

35mm film...had to be taken to the local Kroger or CVS for development.... Took a "lantern" battery and D cells to power it... They HATED the cold. Huge white flash in the dark... About the size of a car battery!

old cam.jpg
 
I don't have pics, but the first trail cam I had required a transmitter shooting a beam to a receiver on another tree. Breaking the beam triggered the pic. Film of course.
 
My first one was not that old but it did use 35 mm film. It took one picture, locked up and never worked again.

I quit on trail cams until a few years later when my second cam was a Reconyx. It and others like it are still getting the job done.
 
My first one must've been invented by Eveready as it was hungrier than a coyote in midwinter. It ate lantern batteries at a prodigious rate, especially in cold weather. I almost burned up my pickup truck while bumping out to put a fresh lantern battery in the camera and my house keys shorted out the coil spring terminals on the lantern battery.
 
My first one was not that old but it did use 35 mm film. It took one picture, locked up and never worked again.

I quit on trail cams until a few years later when my second cam was a Reconyx. It and others like it are still getting the job done.
(My first one was not that old but it did use 35 mm film) Ha ha good one! My first tractor wasn't that old, but it did have a hand crank on the front above the tricycle wheels.
 
I remember picking up the photos was like when you got a new pack of baseball cards as a kid... You wanted to see antlers SO bad, but often was pictures of birds, squirrels and the occasional doe and lots of blurry or over-exposed pics as well. Funny how now my one browning will fit inside of the one pictured and runs for months on 8 "AA" batteries and records video all on a little card (no I have not stepped up to cell cams yet). The other one seemed to go thru batteries in a month and you ran out of film, or you got a bunch of pictures of a limb blowing in the wind! The one good thing was that it was hard to loose a cam back then...because they was so huge!
 
I've heard....because I can't be that old, that there was a trail monitor involving a timer connected to a string across a deer trail that triggered the time when whatever deer happened to pass by first obviously. Hard to determine age and antler score with that thing. Thank goodness I have no pics.
 
I've heard....because I can't be that old, that there was a trail monitor involving a timer connected to a string across a deer trail that triggered the time when whatever deer happened to pass by first obviously. Hard to determine age and antler score with that thing. Thank goodness I have no pics.
I remember seeing those in catalogs....I never used one. I think they called them "trail timer" I didn't get into deer hunting until the mid 90's....
 
My avatar pic is off of my old style "home brew" cam. Canon Owl 35 mm, Radio Shack burglar alarm PIR, Pelican case, 2 switches on the side. 2 AA for the cam, 9V for the rest; My biggest 'success' was convincing the girl at the Wal-Mart photo camera to just charge me for the pics that I wanted to keep. Learned not to mount the cam aimed at a leaning tree (squirrel highway) or raccoon habitat. They'd eat up a roll of film in a heartbeat. I must have soldered up 2 or 3 dozen of them for family and friends. Have kept one(not operational) for old times sake. There was a very active camera forum back then whose name I've long since forgotten. Really good helpful people.
 
I've heard....because I can't be that old, that there was a trail monitor involving a timer connected to a string across a deer trail that triggered the time when whatever deer happened to pass by first obviously. Hard to determine age and antler score with that thing. Thank goodness I have no pics.

And the direction of the string lying on the ground after it had been pulled out of the timer told you which way the "deer" was traveling.
 
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