Beginnings and experiments
How awful can photographs be?
How awful can photographs be?
My Mother had a really good Agfa 2½" square 120 roll-film rangefinder camera when I was young, back in the 60's and early-70's.
It took excellent photos that were promptly ruined by the low-quality, tiny prints available at the time.
Fortunately she kept the negatives, and in the early-2000's I scanned them and recovered their original quality.
Unfortunately in the early-70's it got broken and never repaired so she replaced it with a Kodak Instamatic 110, quite honestly the lowest quality photographic system ever foist upon the public. The pictures were simply awful.
At the time I believed it was the camera but from attempting to scan the negatives I now know it was the tiny, tiny negatives that were at fault.
I have always been fascinated by photography and the moment I could round up enough pcoket money to process the films I borrowed this aboriton of a camera and was promptly put off for years by the dreadful results.
My sister's 126 Instamatic was little better, although the negatives were bigger and have been worth scanning but the cheap plastic optics put paid to any hope of decent images.
At school I discovered a friend had an SLR and borrowing it I finally rediscovered that it was possible to take good quality photos so my journey in to real photography began with an Olympus OM-10, a roll of Kodacolor II 100ASA film and a 50mm f1.8 Zuiko lens.
On scanning these in the early-2000's I could finally realise how good the image quality was. Of course in tricky lighting conditions my experiments often went awry but on a good day I could get what I wanted.