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In the 60s I was really interested in photography, and spent a lot of my parents' money on cameras. Over the years I have had:
Pre-1965: a simple 35 mm camera that my father, also a keen photographer, had bought in the early 50s. It had a 45 mm f/2.8 fixed lens and a shutter with about 1/25 (sic) to 1/250 s speeds. Some of the photos were taken with a screw-on “telephoto” lens that doubled the focal length and caused serious vignetting. I can't remember much else about the camera.
In July 1965 I got an Asahi Pentax SV SLR with a 55 mm f/1.8 Super Takumar:
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Like nearly all SLRs of the time, it didn't have through-the-lens metering, but I did have a clip-on external meter (seen on the photo above) which conveniently made it impossible to attach a flash unit at the same time.
In June 1966, I sold the SV, and on 5 August 1966 I got an Asahi Pentax “Spotmatic”, the first SLR with through-the-lens metering, and thus, I think, the first SLR with any kind of electronics. It has a 50 mm f/1.4 Super Takumar lens. Apart from these details, it is very much like the SV. I still have this camera. The serial number on the camera is 1211890, but that's not the original number: it got damaged during our road trip from Singapore to London, and was replaced by Asahi Optical in Hamburg. The serial number of the original lens is 1591394, but I swapped lenses with my father some time in the late 1960s, and the lens I have now has the serial number 3077746.
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Starting in 1966, I started carrying two cameras with me. The first “second” camera was a FED, a copy of a Leica III with a 50 mm f/2.0 (Leitz) Summar lens, which I bought in Plymouth on 2 April 1966. It also had a genuine Leica III top plate, and was sold to me as a Leica. I didn't find out that it was a Fed until I tried to sell it to a camera dealer, only 10 days later. It wasn't a very nice camera; bottom loaders are a real pain, whether they're genuine or not. About a year later I gave it to a girlfriend.
Also in 1966, I think, I inherited my father's Bolex B-8 standard 8 mm ciné camera. It had two lenses on a rotor. Comparing with the instruction manual, they were probably the 12.5 mm standard and 36 mm telephoto. I didn't use it much, and I no longer have it or any films I took with it.
Only 10 days after the FED I bought an Edixa camera, but my records at the time are scanty. I talk of a body only and a pentaprism, but when I sold it (to the same girlfriend to whom I gave the FED!), it seems that it must have been an Edixaflex S with a 50 mm f/2.9 Meritar and only waist-level viewfinder. It was a “cheap” model with limited shutter speeds (according to the manual 1/500 to 1/25 s, though the photo below shows a top speed of 1/1000 s). It appears not to have had any activation for automatic diaphragms (only the Edixaflex B had that), and of course it had no light meter. On the other hand it had interchangeable viewfinders and screens. It probably looked like this camera, described (in Japanese) here:
On 15 September 1967 I bought an Edixa-mat Reflex D, serial number 273 753. This camera had better specs than the Edixaflex, including shutter speeds to 1 s, automatic diaphragm control and a pentaprism, but still no light meter. With this camera I had some difficulty with the automatic diaphragm actuation, as described here. It was a body only, but it could have looked like this:
After the end of the 60s my photographic activity dwindled. Most of my equipment, including the second Edixa and two Asahi lenses, was stolen from my car in Milano in September 1976, and I was left only with the Spotmatic.
In August 1992, I bought a Pentax Z1 with a 28/85mm f/3.5-f/4.5 zoom. Somehow I have never used it much. It's strange that over the years cameras have become effectively less sensitive. In the mid-60s I used films with sensitivities between ISO 64/19° and 400/27°, with a maximum aperture of f/1.4. With the Z1 I would have needed film sensitivities between ISO 500/28° and 3200/36° to make up for the much smaller aperture.
In July 1998 I bought my first digital camera, a Casio QV-5000 SX, one of the first affordable cameras with 1 megapixel. It lasted about 8 months before failing. I sent it for guarantee repairs, which took 6 months; it arrived back unrepaired. The second time I sent it off was the last I ever saw of it. It never came back. I won't forget Casio for that treatment.
In retrospect, the camera wasn't much good anyway. Take a look at the photos I took with it: the lens was of very poor quality.
In October 1999 I bought a Nikon “Coolpix” 880, with 3 mexapixels and a decent lens. It is quite a nice camera, but slow, and it is particularly bad at rendering skin tones: it makes people look as if they have been drinking excessively the previous night.
In November 2004 I bought a Ricoh Caplio R1 digital camera with 4 mexapixels. The advantages it had were that it had a real wide angle lens (corresponding to 28 mm on a 35 mm camera), and that it was very fast. On the down side the flash exposure was pretty terrible, to the point of being useless on some occasions. Still, I was happy with it until I dropped it on the floor in the cathedral in Amalfi, which it didn't survive.
The next camera is a 6 megapixel Nikon “Coolpix” L1, which I bought in a hurry in Amalfi after accidentally destroying the Ricoh. It has many advantages, but also the slowness and poor skin tone resolution of the Coolpix 880. It doesn't have any wider angle lens than average, either, and strangely, it also doesn't have any way of adjusting the sensitivity: it's stuck at ISO 100. It also seems to get through batteries very quickly. It came with four Sony NiMH batteries (two pairs), and they're the only NiMH batteries that worked with it: all others give up after less than 10 exposures. The batteries are now getting tired, and I've taken to using non-rechargeable alkaline batteries instead, but they don't last long either.
In July 2007 I retired and finally had time to play with cameras again. In August 2007 I bought an Olympus E-510 with 10 megapixels, serial number D64504995.
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At the time of purchase it was very new on the market—the examples in the instructions show dates a couple of days after I paid for it—and it was the only SLR camera on the market with both image stabilization and composing via the LCD monitor (which they call “live view”). It's amusing how times have changed: 50 years ago SLRs showed images through the viewfinder until the photo was taken, and then it went dark.
In September 2007 I bought an Olympus OM-10 camera with a 50 mm f/1.8 Zuiko standard lens and a 80-210mm Tamron telephoto lens, mainly for the latter. I only ever put one film through the camera.
In May 2009 I bought another Olympus, an E-30, serial number G67502432.
My newest camera, bought on 1 August 2010, is an Asahi Pentax SV, serial number 610300. That's right, the same model that I bought 45 years earlier.
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Clearly it was second-hand, and I don't intend to use it (it doesn't even have a light meter!), but it came bundled with the SMC Macro-Takumar 50 mm f/4 shown in the photo, which I wanted to use for macro photos that my Olympus equipment can't do.
One thing that surprises me is that low sensitivity of modern cameras. The “film” sensitivities haven't increased—even digital cameras with adjustable sensitivity tend to opt for ISO 100, and at the ISO 1600 that some of them offer, the quality is pretty terrible. On the other hand, they seldom offer lenses with wider apertures than f/4. At f/1.4, my forty-year old Pentax Spotmatic is three stops more sensitive, so using it with an ISO 400 film would compare with using a modern digital camera set to ISO 3200. And in those days, I really did do available light photography with films pushed to ISO 1600, corresponding to ISO 12,500 on a modern camera.
Most of my cameras have had interchangeable lenses, and I've had a number of them. The list can't be exhaustive, of course: it's easy and interesting to try other people's lenses, and I can't recall all the lenses I have used.
In the 1965-1966 time frame I had the 55 mm f/1.8 Super Takumar standard lens for the Pentax SV, and two different 50 mm f/1.4 Super Takumars for the Spotmatic (I swapped with my father about a year after I bought the Spotmatic). By 1966 I also had a 28 mm f/3.5 Super Takumar, serial number 1364964, and a 135 mm f/3.5 Super Takumar, serial number 1317865, and also bought a 400 mm f/8 Soligor, serial number T 393329. Of these, I still have the second 50 mm Super Takumar, now with yellowed glass. The 28 mm and 135 mm lenses were stolen in Milano (see above), and the 400 mm lens disappeared some time round 1997, possibly when we moved back to Australia.
After the loss of the lenses in Milano, I immediately bought a 28 mm f/2.8 wide angle lens, and later my wife Doris and I bought some relatively cheap lenses the name “Exaktar”, a 35 mm f/2.8 and a 135 mm f/2.8. When we split up, she kept the 35 mm lens and I kept the other two—I think: I can no longer find the 28 mm lens. I also bought an 18 m f/2.8 Sigma extreme wide angle lens, which I sold again in July 2009.
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As if that wasn't enough, in September 2002 I bought another lens, a Hanimex 300 mm f/5.5 telephoto. Unlike the Soligor decades before, it has an automatic diaphragm:
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Most recently, in August 2010, I bought an SMC Macro-Takumar 50 mm f/4 macro lens, serial number 4417366, along with the second Pentax SV mentioned above. It's clearly much later and presumably works (possibly with adaptor) in newer Pentax bodies:
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As I mentioned, I never used the Pentax Z1 much, but I did buy one lens for it, along with the Hanimex, a 80-240 mm f/4 Sun Zoom. I bought it mainly because the price was right: there's something wrong with it, and it no longer focuses to ∞ at shorter focal lengths, but I got it for $10 as a result, and it still works at the longer lengths.
The E-510 came with the standard Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 lens, serial number 212197195. Since then I've been adding gradually:
In May 2008 I bought a Zuiko Digital ED 70-300mm F4.0-5.6 long telephoto lens (equivalent to 140-600 mm on a full frame camera), serial number 825610007.
In September 2008 I replaced the Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 standard lens with a Zuiko Digital ED 12-60mm F2.8-4.0 SWD (equivalent to 24-120 mm on a full frame camera), serial number 230033616.
In May 2009, along with the E-30, I bought a Zuiko Digital ED 9-18mm F4.0-5.6 ultra wide angle lens (equivalent to 18-36 mm on a full frame camera), serial number 300102323.
In August 2009 I bought a Zuiko Digital ED 50mm F2.0 Macro lens (equivalent to 100 mm on a full frame camera).
Apart from the Olympus digital lenses, I used the lenses from the OM-10 on the E-510. Neither was very good. The 50 mm f/1.8 Zuiko standard lens wasn't as good for macro photography as the 50 mm f/1.4 Super Takumar, and it showed significant flare at very close-up range. The 80-210mm Tamron telephoto lens was better, but certainly no match for the 70-300 mm lens I replaced it with.
I also have two Mecablitz flash units, an old 40 CT 4 and a Mecablitz 58 AF-1 O digital, a unit now two years old and therefore not worthy of space on the Metz web site, except for the firmware download page.
My wife Yvonne also uses a camera, though not to the extent I do. For a while she used my Nikon L1, but in June 2009 we bought her a Kodak M1093 IS digital camera. The price is right, and it's relatively easy for her to use. It has a ridiculously high resolution (the same as for the E-510), but of course the picture quality can't hold up, as my sensor test page shows. It also has an annoying habit of locking up the USB interface, requiring a full reset of the camera before a computer will recognize it again. Kodak agreed to replace the unit, but I have no reason to believe that this isn't a design issue.
That problem seems to have gone away, but another, worse one occurred after the one year warranty expired: the camera can no longer focus. I can't imagine it's worth repairing, so after a lot of investigation on bought her a Canon IXY 200F (one of three names by which this camera is known). In Asia that's the name, in Australia it appears to be called IXUS 105, as it is in Europe, and in the USA it's called a PowerShot SD1300 IS DIGITAL ELPH (what a mouthful of mumbo-jumbo!). Why do people have to obfuscate names so much?
In the course of time, the IXY 200F developed similar problems; I assume it's related to the dusty environment in which Yvonne takes many of her photos. It seems that cheap digital cameras aren't designed to cope with that. I've taken to trying to use the camera as a replacement for my Nikon, but it's not clear whether I can get the focus issues sorted out.
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