The Mechanical Eye

If you lived in Kansas City during the 1970s, and particularly if you worked at Hallmark Cards and had any interest in photography, you knew about a camera store in the recently developed Crown Center across the street from the Hallmark Headquarters. The name of the store was the Mechanical Eye and they had everything from Nikons to Kodak Instamatics (remember those days?), darkroom equipment to One-Week photo finishing. (Just kidding about the one week business - sometimes you could get stuff back the next day, but there definitely wasn't any One-Hour processing.)

I bought my first name brand SLR there, a Minolta SR-T101, or maybe an SR-T102. Minolta was the first to have a camera with through the lens metering, "... but unlike its competitors it did this at full aperture. Where other manufacturers were struggling with systems where the photographer would have to stop the lens down to check the metering, the Minolta SR-T101 enabled metering to be conducted with the lens wide open. This meant that the meter reading in the viewfinder was always clear and bright, and that the photographic process could be more about inspiration, not perspiration." [from The Rokkor Files]

Eventually I moved up to Nikon, first getting an F2, then an FM and finally an FE. Of course the store had all the accessories, and for Nikon that is a LOT of accessories - right angle viewfinders, motor drives, gazillions of lenses. I had to buy a Domke camera bag just to haul around all that stuff. Three bodies, a 24mm wide angle, a 50mm 1.8, a 105mm macro, 135mm and 200mm teles. I finally sold the whole lot and bought a Pentax IQ Zoom 160, one of the first point and shoot fixed zoom lens cameras. It was so good, however, that I shot my brother's wedding with it and got great results.

I'm not sure when the Mechanical Eye closed its doors, but a great camera store with lots of good memories was lost. The title of this blog is my little homage to that wonderful store...