155+126 = No interest in photography
I started with a little fixed lens Kodak Instamatic model 155. Weirdly, I distinctly recall the type of film: Kodak 126 film cartridge. I can’t remember quite what it looked like, but I do remember the shutter was quite hard to press for a kid; of course, many shots were blurred because I happened to shoogle* the camera when taking a photo. (*Shoogle is the Scots’ term for giving something a shake.)
My mother also loved to use it to take family photos in the mountains of Scotland which is why we had it. In those days, the photographs were turned into ‘slides’ for family shows on a small slide viewer, we didn’t have a projector.
The photographs didn’t excite me much, nor the act of photography. There didn’t seem to be much creativity in the process, just a family huddled together faces expectantly looking at the camera, set against an uninteresting backdrop of Scottish mountains.
Lubitel 166 Days
It was a long time before I began to get interested in photography. Money was always tight as a student, no budget to really afford a better camera. One Lubitel fell into my hands in the late 80’s – Lubitel 166, I think it was.
I hadn’t got a clue how to use it, no real clue how to make use of the unique triple lens. Wikipedia says you “… can achieve excellent results when the lens is stopped down but, as with any three-element lens, the results will be soft by today’s standards at larger apertures.”
In those days, I would have thought it was just unintelligible! Oddly, my sister started using it after I abandoned it for a Praktica Camera when I set off for Asia in 1992. Not sure what she made of it. I certainly didn’t get much out of it!
A Praktica choice
On to the Praktica, which I still have, somewhere. I took quite a few photographs with it, and enjoyed using it. I developed a lot of images from Hong Kong, and recently found the negatives. I should scan them for archival!
It came with two lenses: a fix and a zoom. I probably used both fairly well, but it was expensive to develop film with results often less than stellar, so I resolved to learn how to use a darkroom at some point. But life had other plans, as did the digital revolution.
So that was my first SLR camera… but it takes more than a tool to take great pictures…
Part 2 coming up: more about the Praktica, Yashica, Kodak… Yes, I’ve had a lot of cameras!