The Single Lens Reflex camera
Or "why I failed my A-levels"
Or "why I failed my A-levels"
At school I discovered a friend had an SLR.
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.
The big issue was not being able to get close enough to things, especially aircraft, so a telephoto lens was needed.
Then I couldnt get enough into the frame so a wide-angle lens was needed.
Reciprocity failure meant low-light photography didn't work well (and the yellow cast from tungsten bulbs didn't help) so a flash gun was needed.
I wanted to photograph motion so a motor-wind was needed.
My telephoto shots were blurred so a tripod was needed.
All this wouldn't fit in to my pockets so a camera bag was needed
And by the time I had done all this the time for revising for A-Levels was up and I hadn't done enough. It is tempting to blame photography on my worse-than-expected A-level results, but the photos were great.....
The motor-wind trashed the OM-10's shutter advamce mechanism so I upgraded to an OM-2 which lasted me for 9 years and would have gone on a lot longer had I not taken it parasailing in Tunisia when the boat engine failed and the salt water trashed the camera. The film, however, was recoverable.
An OM-2SP replaced the stricken SLR and I bought an OM-20 to act as backup camera, always loaded with B/W film.
Fun was always to be had at Airport Security where I did not want my film, exposed or not, sent through the X-ray machine. I knew repeated passes would eventually fog the film so always tried to reduce the number of passes, mostly successfully.
Prints were often a poor result and of course all 36 (or 37 if you were lucky) had to be printed. The lack of editing facilities was frustrating: many pictures merely needed rotating or gently cropping, so I always kept the negatives against the knowledge that one day I would have the ability to edit them properly.
I had very little success in processing my films using C41 chemcals and despite considerable investment in an enlarger and printing chemicals my blow ups always had terrible colour casts and the costs were astronomical.
But by the turn of the Century increased computing power and a surplus scanner from work allowed experiments in digitisation of prints and then negatives. The digital era had begun.