Cameras & Me - An Introduction

There comes a time, or so it seems, in every wannabe photographers life, when moving things forward almost inevitably involves moving backwards. Back to a time when things were easier and therefore more fun, or so it seems.

I'm no technophobe, but I do find every upgrade to a new mobile device brings fewer knobs and dials to play with, and ever more menus to navigate and (to me) hidden features that need discovering. It's not so much difficult as just... well, tedious really. Learning time is surely better spent when there's an element of fun too, and I've never found tech that much fun to be honest.

THE CAMERAS

I've been through an awful lot of point-and-shoot's in my time, some of which were pretty high quality Autofocus cameras with good lenses and cool styling (a Yashica T4 for example), some were truly abysmal cheapies that I regret wasting film on to this day. My lifestyle meant that a camera was predominantly for recording gigs, parties, drunken holidays etc. the hedonism of youth in all it's out-of-focus and grainy glory, hence many cameras were broken, or indeed lost (a Yashica T4 for example). I went ever cheaper in the sure knowledge that expense was wasted on cameras and me. I never went down the disposable camera route though, I never sank that low...

Image c/o Frode Inge Helland (used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Ported license)

My first 'proper' camera was a Praktica B100 (above), an automatic SLR that my Dad encouraged me to buy so that with the aid of a Tamron adapter I could use some of his fancy Olympus lenses. I loved everything about this camera, it looked and felt like a proper grown-up camera should, got me into the habit of shooting Aperture Priority, and gave me a good grounding in the mysteries of Depth of Field and Manual Focussing. I had this camera for a good few years before dropping it and cracking the body, at which point I upgraded to a Praktica BC1, which for some reason I didn't love quite as much.

Fast forward to Digital, of which I was a fairly early adopter, although it took a good few years before I moved on from autofocus compacts and invested in one of those cool Olympus PEN (right) cameras advertised by Kevin Spacey. This has been without a doubt my hardest working camera, at the very heart of almost all the content on my previous blogs. I love the slightly retro look and compact format which is almost pocketable. The lens is a bit chonkier than the super-cool pancake job Spacey was packing in those adverts, and of course compact means dispensing with a proper viewfinder, but I've found this such a useable camera in every way. Whilst it's still in the house this camera is no longer mine, and I still miss it. In fact I may pinch it back one day...

It was around this time I started with the whole 'looking back to go forward' thing. I wanted those dials and knobs back, and a few more megapixels and a viewfinder of sorts wouldn't hurt, hence an upgraded Olympus PEN (above), a camera which if truth be told I hardly use these days. Not through any fault of the camera I hasten to add, more that it coincided with a serious cooling of interest in the blog that had been a minor obsession for the best part of ten years. Put simply, I had all the gear, but really no idea what to use it for, and every time I thought of taking the Olympus out for a spin I'd find the battery needed charging.

Meanwhile, cameras on phones had got very good at what they do. I should know, I use mine an awful lot theses days. All the talk was that discreet camera formats had very much had their day, which for a great many of us is probably true. But until they put a few more knobs and dials on phones...

Anyone with an interest in photography (or indeed recorded music) will have noticed the growing interest in analogue formats. I guess when things become so easy, so immediate, there will always be a desire to slow things down, take more care, reconnect with what we loved about photography in the first place. For me it's about feeling that buzz I felt when I first started learning to capture images on a 1980's East German camera, accepting the limitations of what was then a beginners SLR and making it work as best I could. And let's not forget that some vintage cameras are just so good looking, so desirable!

Take this little Bencini Comet II that I bought for the wife, a beautiful late-40's design from Italy that probably still works but takes a film format which is hard to come by now, very expensive, and a bit fiddly to use successfully, so this camera will remain a decorative piece for now, but the flame was lit.

Start looking at vintage cameras and I promise you, you'll soon want a vintage camera. In amongst the many hundreds of clunky, impractical, ugly, obsolete and of course broken examples available, there will be one for you, a camera you may even fall in love with. If you're lucky it may even work. I fell in love with a Soviet era copy of the classic Leica II 35mm camera, and for all of the reasons above. Loads of knobs and dials as befits a fully manual camera, a readily available if now quite expensive film format, unusually pocket-size for such a good camera, looks absolutely beautiful, and is really quite difficult to use! It works too...

So this camera is, as far as I can tell, a FED-1(f) Rangefinder from around 1953, serial No.347457. There's a lot of information out there about these cameras which I don't intend to repeat here, and needless to say a lot of opinion too. It's not a Leica obviously, despite what the leather case might suggest. In truth I don't think I'd want to be re-learning 35mm film photography on a Leica, they're pretty expensive to buy, and equally expensive to restore/repair when broken by an idiot like me, so to have a relatively inexpensive copy that seems to be working reasonably well ticks all the boxes that I require for now.

Anyway, this blog is not really about the camera, more the journey I'll be taking towards rediscovering my enthusiasm for photography.