My first camera and blog
I finally decided to start to write about my passion, photography, which is forming the biggest part of my renewed life. This is the first blog about it and it is also the first blog I’ve written, ever ;-)
As mentioned in my bio, I’ve loved photography from childhood. The first pictures I have taken with a film camera my father gave me to use. It was a 35 mm rangefinder, but not a Leica M, which I fell in love with later. It had a brown protective leather cover and I loved the feel of it. I should ask my father if he still has it and also to show the old photos in boxes and albums to see if I could recognise any taken by me. That would take me back into my childhood memories when there was no internet, social media or mobile phones. Luckily we had cameras and photography.
As a teenager I started to earn some pocket money by distributing paper advertisements for a local shop. It gave me a possibility to buy my first own camera, a second-hand Zenit with a 50 mm lens. It didn’t have the TTL (Through The Lens) metering so using it was fully manual. Taking pictures with it was very educational helping to understand how a correct exposure is the result of a right combination of aperture, shutter speed and ISO of the film. It’s still like that, but the alignment is done automatically by the camera, and even in full manual mode you can rely on the camera light metering accuracy to get the exposure you are looking for, or with the mirrorless you can see the final result as you shoot. Having the possibility to change & adapt the ISO in digital cameras is also a big difference. With film you are limited to the sensitivity you have chosen until the whole roll of film has been used. It makes me wonder how we got reasonably correctly exposed pictures earlier at all, but I suppose film is also forgiving, exposure correction done in the development phase, like you do in post-processing today.
Continuing the film era, my second camera was a black Olympus OM-2, with two different lenses. I don’t remember much of it, or the exact lenses, but the tele was suitable for macro photography and I remember chasing butterflies and other insects to take pictures of them. Having TTL metering also eased up the photography in a major way. After the initial excitement, I didn’t use the camera as much as earlier, possibly because of other hobbies, maybe the size of it, and studying. In the end I changed the OM-2 into a pocked size Olympus XA, which I still have. I’ll write more about it next time.
If you got this far, I thank you for your interest! I also hope that it was not too long, at least as a first blog post ;-)