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First camera you bought?


glen_h

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Nikon FA . Actually it was given to me by my manager when I worked at a high end department store while studying Mechanical Engineering at Penn State. Later to find out he had stolen it (among other things) But that camera started my whole career as a photographer. It got me through photography school at the Art Institute of Philadelphia and the first few jobs till I bought a Mamiya RZ67 . And I still use the FA today.... Actually not today :rolleyes: Today Im going out with the RZ67 kit cause I just sold it all on Ebay and need to use up the film thats loaded in it.... :D
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First camera some kind of Box Brownie, when I was seven or eight. Tried to photograph night sky with it, but it fell off the garden roller. First I bought myself was some kind of Kodak 126, which the sales person assured me took interchangeable lenses. Next was a Praktica Nova !, with 50mm f2.9 Meritar preset lens, then a Zodel 2MTL with 50mm, 135mm and 35mm lenses. Then a succession of Prakticas, Cosina CT1g, then four (4) Ricoh KR10 Supers (slow slide, fast slide, slow mono, fast mono) and a selection of lenses.

 

After that I moved to K-mount Pentax, where I am now, both film and digital.

 

Forgot to mention Nikon F (2), Nikon F2 (2, one black with MD) and Nikon F3. Unfortunately lost, like so much stuff, in fire.

Edited by Tony Parsons
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  • 3 weeks later...
My very first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 104...had the old flash cube that mounted on top and used the old 126 film cartridge (not sure if they're available anymore outside of Ebay). I still have the camera, albeit with a broken battery door that seemed to be a common fault. The very first camera that I actually paid for was a Canon AE-1...still have that, too (along with a host of other Canon film bodies).
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.... the first one I bought was digital :-) A Fuji A201, compact very simple camera with fixed lens and 2 whole megapixels. I was trying to learn image editing at the time, and wanted a way to get materials to play with in Photohop. It was the cheapest camera I could find (and afford), and it made me realise I liked taking photos better than I like editing them.

 

First film camera I bought myself was a heavily used Nikon F3. Lovely camera, but it's eating batteries (probably some leaking condensator somewhere), so it sees no more use these days.

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The first was a Konica T-2 I purchased from the NYC Camera Barn in 1971. it was owned by Fred Alba and he later sold third party lens called Albinar. I was 19 and my co-worker was Sid Desfor, formerly head of NBC photography until he retired in 1968. Sid got bored and returned to work in a Wall Street operations back office and trained me in the summer of 69. His brother Max won a Pulitzer Prize for photography during the Korean War. I learned quite a lot from him and loved the camera until it was stolen on 1977 and I bought a Pentax MX to replace it. Just bought a used Konica T2 and it looks like new! Never forgot Sid's first lesson, you don't want blurred photo's so he pointed me at a shutter priority when the store suggested a Pentax Spotmatic.
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  • 2 weeks later...
I believe the first camera I ever bought is my Argus C-20 which I found at a yard sale when I was 6 or 7. it was only $2 and I remember buying it purely out of curiosity of what the thing was lol. it sat in storage unused for many years but I recently pulled it back out. still works great.
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My first camera was a Praktica Super TL. The camera was fine but I had the lens replaced because one of the aperture blades was unreliable. The replacement was a more expensive lens labeled 'auss Jena' so it was a Carl Zeiss Jena lens. I have used the camera for about 5 years and purchased a used Rolleicord Va. I still own both cameras. The Praktica broke down eventually, the Cord is OK but is more or less retired.
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The first camera I ever used was a Kodak 35 rangefinder and a Weston meter. After that my parents gave me an Instamatic (killed my interest in photography for a few years) and then I started borrowing my father's Honeywell Pentax H3V. The first camera I bought with my own money was a used Contax RTS with a 45mm f2.8 Tessar. After that came an odd journey. The RTS had odd exposure issues whenever it got humid outside and went to Contax/Yashica for service. After a couple of trips back and forth they decided they couldn't sort out the problem and sent me a RTSII body that had been out for test with some pros. The delivery service lost it and their insurance got me a brand new RTSII. I used that happily with an assortment of Zeiss lenses until I finally sold it a few years ago to finance a Nikon DSLR (I was running a Nikon SLR system in parallel, y'see). I still sometimes regret selling it and the lenses and it was reliable beyond reproach. Ah well!
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The first camera that I USED was an Argus C3 that belonged to my father. I started shooting with this in 1976. The first camera bought FOR ME was a Fujica ST-605 at Christmas, 1976. The first camera that I bought? Myself? I have no idea . . . I used to buy all sorts of box cameras and such at flea markets. Usually with film still in them.

 

The first real camera that I bought was a used Nikon 8008 somewhere around 1990.

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I wanted a nice camera for Christmas back when I was a teen in the late 70's. I got a polaroid one-step, - not exactly what I had in mind.

 

The summer after I got my first real adult job (post college) I went on a canoe trip. I had a camera on that trip that was likely the first camera I bought for myself. It was probably a decent point and shoot since I was single and had some amount of disposable income though I don't remember what I bought. This would have been in 1988. I had the pictures put on a photo-cd. It's kind of funny now that I think about it. I may have bought that first camera expressly for that trip and by getting that photo-cd I was already dipping my toes in the digital waters.

 

A few years later I left that camera on a beach by accident. I definitely got another film camera but again I don't remember what it was. This would have been in the early to mid 90's.

 

I remember my first digital camera was a used Ricoh I got from eBay or some other online source. This was in the late 90's. This started a string of digital camera purchases that lasted for quite awhile.

 

What got me re-interested in film cameras is a long story and this is already a long post. Anyway, I was given a free Canon T-50 that was semi-broken. It was my first SLR or DSLR. Not at all a manual camera but it wasn't long before I got an AE-1P which led to a bunch of other purchases. In the last 3 years I've probably obtained over 20 film cameras. Fortunately I've been passing them on almost as fast I get them. ;)

 

Right now I have 5 with a goal of keeping only 2... or 3. ;)

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It is so fun to read everyone's stories, the evolution and epiphanies on the camera's experienced and in some cases, still existent in the collection. I've been in the game for close over 45 years, starting with the Diana-type plastic fantastic found somewhere in the basement of one of the many houses we lived in. Used my Dad's somewhat abandoned Kodak Retina, til a good family friend gifted darkroom development supplies (the tank, reel and old chemicals) to my twin brother and me...with our paper route money we bought a Nikon F with the old T-finder, 70-210mm Series One, and a 24mm f2.8 Nikkor, which we used extensively for years, until stolen when our house was burglarized. I kept the faith and soldiered on in the area, buying another camera/s, set up my own darkroom, developing all my own film, to the present day. There is nothing more exciting than seeing those negatives for the first time come off the reel, or the print developing in front of your eyes - I never get tired of it. Thanks for posting this question - it's a wonderful experience to read the replies, and take a trip down memory lane.
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"It's not what you look at that matters. It's what you see."

-Henry David Thoreau

Bert

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Polaroid 600. I collected enough green stamps (actually branded Quality Stamps, as I recall) from my mom's grocery store trips, and then she helped me paste them into the little books. We took those to the exchange store to get the camera.
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The first camera I ever bought was some 110 model that has been lost to the dust bins of history -- thankfully. I owned several different ones over the years and thought they all did a good job. Until I went to an air show with my cheezy 110 and there I was, standing right next to a guy with a Brobdingnagian Pentax 6x7, complete with its extremely beefy wooden handle. I was stunned that such a large camera was even hand-holdable. Of course, it didn't hurt that the guy wielding it was the size of a lumberjack, but still that camera made an indelible impression. And I also recall when I got my photos back from processing how suddenly underwhelming everything looked. My eyes had truly been opened. Within a few months of this experience, I bought my first real camera -- a 35mm SLR -- and a very predictable one at that: a Canon AE-1. This camera started me down the long, winding, convoluted road that I stand in now, wondering what lies ahead.
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Topcon Super-D with 58mm f/1.8 RE. Auto-Topcor lens. From the late lamented Olden Camera, on March 25, 1975. $169. Went into the city with my mom (and her BankAmericard) while visiting my aunt and uncle in Old Bethpage, Long Island, NY. They started by showing me the flaky beat-up ones whose mirrors weren't going all the way up. Once they could tell I was a savvy customer, they showed me the best one from the right end of the row.

 

Also got the lens hood for $6.40, the No. 2 focusing screen for $10.00, and a hippie strap for $5.95. Plus sales tax at what then seemed like an outrageous 8%.

 

Shot a test roll and developed it there. Here's their house, the second shot I took:

 

149804732_2smaller.thumb.jpg.66e726c329cc650a5bed0981a6fba765.jpg

 

I still have the camera, but it now needs repair, the mirror doesn't always get all the way out of the way. Along the way I've accumulated a full set of RE. Auto-Topcor and R. Topcor lenses. Here it is today:

 

IMG_1901.thumb.jpg.371055b391df957907d5ea219326686f.jpg

 

It's no longer my favored film camera, I've switched to Pentax, with the LX as the best manual focus film camera, MZ-3 as best auto-focus film camera, and the K-1 as the digital beast. But I have great affection for it. I'll fix it sometime, I've got the service manual.

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I bought (I think!) a toy camera in grammar school that actually spit out prints, but my memory of that is foggy! I can't imagine how it would have worked. That was in the 50's.

Then I got a Kodak box camera of some kind in high school that probably took 620 film. The image size is 1- 5/8" square. It had settings for daylight and indoors.

Finally after college I bought a Canon TLb. Always lagging behind my buddy who bought an FTb. I finally bettered him when I bought medium format.

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1-5/8" square (4cm) images would be 127 film. Popular film size in budget cameras in that era.

 

I do remember 120 or 620 cameras that give 16 exposures, while masking off part of the film for a square image.

Those would be the cheap plastic ones.

-- glen

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