Nostalgia time

Well I have talked about most of the cameras I ever owned and here are two more for now. I shot this image just yesterday as part of my pbase "Photo a Day" activity. The lighting was the issue that occupied me the most but in the end, the subject itself looked so fetching that I simply HAD to include the picture here.

What do you think? Isn't it beautiful? This old OM10 was part of the famous Olympus "OM" series which began with the ground breaking OM1. The little silicon chip icon on the front of the body was to indicate that this camera was among the first to incorporate "computer technology" into a metering system.

Mind you, I purchased this camera for personal use back in 1980, just when the old Apple 2 computer reigned supreme. It is difficult to imagine that either the OM10's circuitry or its firmware was able to do anything especially clever. Nonetheless I took countless nice images with this device - mostly running Kodachrome 64 or various of the Ektachromes for transparencies.

I especially love the glow that cameras of the period get when you light them half decently. Most especially those wonderful old lens coatings used to reveal so many colours when you lit them like this. When you pick up an old film SLR it somehow has a solidity that even very expensive DSLRs lack. Sigh! I loved it back then when one breathlessly waited for the slides to come back from Kodak. For all the improvements which digital cameras allow us to achieve in our images, I still miss the magic of the little yellow boxes.

Some people are never satisfied - wouldn't you agree? This is especially true of silly old codgers with rose coloured glasses.

Of course the first half way decent 35mm camera I ever owned (from 1967) has a special place in my heart and of course I sold it (like an idiot) many many years ago. It was a classic rangefinder type - the Minolta Himatic 7s . This picture is from Matt Denton's terrific website, part of which is a kind of classic camera museum: http://mattdentonphoto.com/camera

The time of my life in which the Himatic 7s played a part was well before I ever made money from images but my experiences with that camera helped turn my soul toward photography like no other.

See my work at: www.pbase.com/davidhobbs