I have been looking at the equipment I use now for my photography, and comparing it to the equipment I used when I first started. This got me thinking about all the equipment I have used over the years, and why I chose that particular path. Did choices I made years ago affect my more recent decisions? Were they justified?
I will begin a review of the equipment, and systems I have used over the years, and I will try to explain why that equipment was good or bad and whether or not I would use it again?
So first of all let’s start with my first camera, given to me one Christmas by my paternal grandmother; a Kodak Brownie. The camera was originally given to grandmother by my father. She had used it for many years before passing it on to me.
(Image source; www.canalscape.net)
This was a fairly basic camera; it took 127 film (black and white or colour) and the only controls I can remember were the film advance knob and the shutter release. They were extremely popular at one time, being very simple and relatively inexpensive. I seem to remember Kodak had a “motto”, “you press the shutter and we’ll do the rest”.
If I remember correctly I only ever put two films through it, and of those two films one “holiday snap” was quite good.
It was a scenic shot of Ventnor taken on our family holiday the following June. It was enough, the bug had bitten and I was hooked.
My dad, who was quite keen on photography having been an aerial photographer in the RAF, had an Olympus OM10 and I believe an Agfa rangefinder type camera, he used to take slides on 35mm. I could not aspire to that type of equipment at that time as I only had my pocket money (not much in the 1970s).
I would have to wait until I left school and earned my own money…
I have still got the Brownie somewhere, and I still have the negative that got me hooked; If I can find it maybe I’ll scan it in and upload it here. Then you can decide whether or not I have improved…
