I?ll be 58 next All Saints Day.
My first camera was a Kodak Autographic Junior 8 on 120, sold to me by a
school friend who first taught me about the relationship between shutter
speeds and apertures (also the rules of tennis and how cars work). Three
years later I bought my first 35mm camera, a Regula L, meterless with scale
focussing, which I used with the assistance of a Nebro Lite extinction meter
and an unbranded rangefinder the size of a large pocket calculator with a
long sliding lever at the end. (This is making me feel really ancient.)
My first experience with an s.l.r. was with an Aires Reflex 35, a sort of
Japanese version of a Zeiss Contaflex. Again meterless but I used a Weston
Master II and I still have some well-exposed slides from that camera. The
first interchangeable lens s.l.r. I had was a Petriflex 5, soon followed by
a Petriflex 7 after I had started working for the dealer who sold it to me.
A few months before, I had bought my first Olympus cameras, a used Pen S,
which I had been using only with black & white film for street candids,
which I shot from chest level, for which it was ideal, as it could be
focussed by feel by its click-stopped focussing ring. It was a customer
bringing into the shop a box of half frame slides to try out on our slide
projectors that converted almost all of us, and Pen D, Pen F and Pen FT
cameras monopolised much of my photography for several years thereafter. The
only non-Olympus half frame camera that I tried out was a wind-up Canon Dial
35, the spring of which broke within an hour.
Returning later to full frame 35mm, a brief period with a Nikkormat outfit
was very disappointing and I felt lucky to exchange it for a similar Leica
M2 outfit, which was not, and years passed before I even thought of
acquiring another s.l.r.
Moving on ten years, the Leica had been sold to buy medium format and 5 x 4
stuff, which in turn was sold when the commercial and wedding studio I?d
been working for changed ownership, and I was gradually beginning to recover
my lost enthusiasm for amateur photography, but not enough to pay out
serious money. I decided on a Kiev 4, the Russian built 1938 Contax III
rangefinder camera, which was available new at a ridiculously low price,
which was handy because by then I was out of the photographic trade and was
a seriously underpaid service engineer. The Kiev was no Leica but it had a
charm of its own and I eventually acquired all five lenses available for it.
It?s only drawback was the cumbersome method of obtaining macro photos ? by
repeatedly replacing the body with a focussing housing with ground glass
screen, and it was solely that limitation that set me off looking for a
cheap s.l.r. to use in conjunction with it. As I was happy with the Kiev?s
Russian lenses, the obvious choice was a Zenith with built in meter, but I
had to return the one I bought to the dealer because the meter was
defective. He didn?t have another one but offered me a ?good deal? on a used
Soligor/Miranda, which I accepted, but returned it the following day because
I just didn?t like its flimsy feel. The dealer must have been pleased to see
it go for he certainly didn?t want it back! During the heated argument that
ensued it became clear that there wasn?t an s.l.r. in the shop below three
times the price of this Soligor and he wasn?t going to give me a cash
refund, so it was going to cost me much more than I?d budgeted not to take
it back home. The choice was limited to just Olympus or Contax/Yashica, and
as I knew little about the latter and was already a fan of the former, I
told him I?d be willing to pay the difference and buy an OM-1n. He tried to
talk me out of it, telling me that it was a system camera and less suitable
for my requirements than the Soligor, and that I?d be taking it back again
tomorrow, but I persisted and came away with both the OM-1n, f1.8 Zuiko, and
an unexpected extra load on my credit card!
No I didn?t take it back, but it could not, of course, be just the macro
option for my Kiev outfit that I?d originally wanted and I later sold the
latter to finance the purchase of additional OM gear.
Regards,
Keith Berry (Birmingham, UK)
keith_r.k.berry@xxxxxxxxxx
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