My interest in photography goes back a long
way. A friend who was a couple of
years older than me got into it as a kid, and I accompanied him to shots, and
stood in his dark room. I guess I
developed my first print aged about 12, standing under a red filtered light in
a converted shed. I can still
smell the chemicals, and recall the thrill of seeing the picture appear.
Around 1973 I bought a Zorkie 4, the USSR copy of
the Lieca. With no
light meter, and being a rangefinder, it was complicated and hard to get decent
results with. I cant recall a
single good photo from it.
A couple of years later I bought a Zenit EM,
also USSR made, black bodied with a light meter built into the body. This was a bit better, although I found
a hand held meter and a lot of guesswork was still essential. Battling the
technical aspects was harder than framing and composition.
In the late 70s I went to Dubai, and either
just before or on arrival, I bought a black bodied Pentax ME with a 50mm
lens. This had TTL, through the
lens metering, and suddenly photography was a lot easier, or at least I had a
chance of getting the exposure right.
The ME was an aperture priority automatic camera, with no manual
capability, split screen focussing
(manual of course, autofocus was just a dream in a few engineers minds back
then), and no indication of the
shutter speed. You set the aperture and the ME did the
rest. I bought a screw thread adaptor for the Pentax Pentax K mount, and a
couple of cheap lenses – a 35mm and a 200mm. And I had a ball.
I loved that camera, and I lost it only when I got divorced and my wife
threw it out.
I then went through a succession of Nikons.
Some new some second hand. I was
buying bodies in the faint hope that they would make me a better photographer.
Of course they didn’t, and I spent a
fortune. I didn’t even trade up, I
just kept buying. At one time on
the shelf I had a Nikon EM, an FE, and FG-20, and F501 (autofocus!!!) and an
F4.
And I was still a useless photographer.
No comments:
Post a Comment