Verge Collection

I've lost the little card the council sent me to tell me when the verge collections are. I'm stumped - I know there was a white goods day and a green waste day but I can't remember the day they wanted us to put our old photographic lenses on the side of the road. I'll have to ring up for another - there are fresh lenses coming out from the camera manufacturers and the shed is starting to fill up with the old ones. You let it go a year and there won't be enough space in there for the lawnmower and the folding garden chairs. I had no idea this would be a problem when I was just starting photography. I had a Pentax Sv with a 55mm Takumar lens that I never unscrewed - because there was nothing else to go onto it. I was so poor at the time that I took all my pictures with that one lens and they are still in my collection. And fool that I was, I didn't realise that you shouldn't do it...I had not had a chance to read enough advertising in the photo magazines. Well, I got richer. I bought more lenses. I bought more cameras. I changed systems. I changed formats. I changed entire forms of photography. I doodled around. I bought and sold at least 40 different lenses in the time - roughly 1.4 lenses for every year I'd been shooting. And the shameful part of it is... Some of them are not even represented by a single picture in my collection. Maybe by a negative hidden deep in the fingerprint section of the files...but nothing I care to show or boast about. Because I have bought some optical dogs in my time. Note that I do not blame the sellers - some of them were good friends. I blame the buyer who did himself no favours with his choices. He was driven by imagination, assumption, and advertisement - only one of those factors was out of his control. He persuaded himself to make his own mistakes. And he did this before the internet, the YouTube, or his own weblog column. That's ambition... Were he starting again: He would not start again. He would keep the 55mm standard f:1.8 lens - or its equivalent - on his new digital camera and take all his pictures with it. He would concentrate on framing the scenes and people with it as it is, and end up with far more keepers than losers. He would do what he is doing right now with a stable of Fujifilm cameras: keep 27mm and 35mm lenses on each one and use them for studio and field shooting. Only occasionally would he change off to a very wide angle lens for scenery or a kit zoom for videography. And he would park his lens envy and optical angst on the verge for the next council collection...as soon as he could find out the date it will be. PS: Don't come cruising our street with a ute and a trailer looking for resaleable trash. I've been to the flea markets...