I don't know who gave this to me. Parents, Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, friends of the family...no idea. All I know is that when I was very young, I had this camera and I loved playing with it, even if I didn't have film loaded into it. I was only 2 years old when this camera came out so naturally getting actual 110 cartridge film and then getting it developed was a rather rare opportunity. I have no idea if anything I ever took with it has survived to the modern day. I can't comment on the quality of the pictures (again toddler) but I'm sure it was decent enough for a young child, such as myself. Like the photos I took with it, the actual camera I had is likely also lost to time, either donated when I out grew it, or sold at a garage sale long ago. Heck, it could even be in my parent's basement somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered. I have been meaning to go eBay to try and find one and getting some new 110 film and seeing what the experience is like as an adult. Could be a fun time and have some really neat aesthetics with it's I presume plastic lens.
Again, I'm not sure who gave this camera to me, or if it is in fact the one I had. Pretty sure though, it looks like how I remember it looking from ~25 years ago. Either way this was a step up from the Fisher Price. It used this newfangled APS film which I thought was the coolest back in the day. I really don't remember much else about it, the ease of loading and unloading was super cool, but this camera was likely gotten rid of when new APS carts stopped being made, or when the switch to digital was more widely seen. I probably threw it in a drawer and focused on other things. Like the Fisher Price camera, the camera and more than likely any pictures I shot on it are long gone. While looking up this camera though, I found that Vivitar also made some similar styled 35mm point and shoot cameras, so perhaps I will track one of those down on eBay for that ultra late 90's vibes.
I got this digital camera, I believe for my birthday or perhaps Christmas in 2008 from my grandparents. By this point I was older and probably bugging my parents to use their digital camera so a nice point and shoot digicam was perfect to start playing around with photography as an art medium and not just a neat thing to do. My work with this camera also led me onto my one attempt at being a photojournalist as a freelancer for the Woodstock Indepedent. The Independent was a small weekly newspaper for the goings on in my hometown of Woodstock, IL and other things around McHenry County. I only did one assignment and I was a nervous wreck the entire time because I was supposed to take some pictures of a Iraq War soldier returning home from deployment with his family. I had no idea at the time that I was neurodivergent and was just so shy the entire time. I did manage to take a picture and then I spend off. I think I still have the old pictures somewhere in digital cold storage. Either way I got 50 bucks which was cool, but I never did anything for them again. I didn't stop taking pictures though and continued to use this lil' guy until it stopped working