Your FIRST 35mm Camera...

gnashings · 06-04-2005, 06:30 AM

This place was looking a bit dead...not much doing, so i thought this might be fun. Lets see what all you folks cut your teeth on - what was your first 35mm camera!

Here is me: this little East German thing that you had to walk ten steps away from your subject to be more less in focus! Then you wound the little wheel until it stopped. As far as I recall, your legs were the only adjustment.

But the first real 35mm (I had a Lubitel after that) camera was a Zenit ( I forget which letters - I think MF - it had a photo-cell light meter over the lens). It still works although the rewind knob broke and I cant locate the pieces to fix it (and I just realized that I can't locate the camera... wife cleaned the place...it can be anywhere... it may be in YOUR house!). Pretty good for over 20 years of use!

Hope everyone has fun recollecting!

Peter.

mikebarger · 06-04-2005, 06:54 AM

mine was a baldinette folder

mike

Andy K · 06-04-2005, 07:07 AM

My father bought my brother and I a pair of Zorki 4Ks for Christmas '76. Still got it and it's still going strong.

micek · 06-04-2005, 08:05 AM

Olympus OM1n. I was 16. I am 43 now and it is still my only 35mm slr. The more cameras I use, the more I like it.

Magnus W · 06-04-2005, 08:17 AM

It was a Canon AE-1. I was sixteen and had used my fathers Diax 1a, and Agfa Isolette up until then. A few years later I traded my Canon equipment for a Pentax LX that I'm still using, 25 years later.

-- MW

TPPhotog · 06-04-2005, 08:38 AM

Zenit EM with the standard lens + a 135mm telephoto, all brand new out of the box

Sadly I no longer have it as it was lost during my first (and only at the moment) divorce

Some things you want to lose others you don't

jnanian · 06-04-2005, 08:38 AM

pentaxk1000 -
it has a bit of duct tape on it and works as well as it did
whin i got it in 81'

shyguy · 06-04-2005, 08:42 AM

my first 35 was a old nikon if i recall, that my father used in ww2.

S

B-3 · 06-04-2005, 08:49 AM

An Olympus OM-10. My father bought it for me and stressed the importance of the manual operations. After taking it along on many backpacking trips and all the way to dusty Africa, I took it in for a CLA. The dealer charged me 20 dollars just to look at it, told me that it was hopeless and beyond repair, and that it would cost me another 20 dollars to get it back. I was young, broke, and naive, so that was the last I saw of the OM-10 and it was the end of photography for me for a long while.

Several years later I finally bought a used Pentax K-1000. Lovely camera, but I'm mostly using a Yashica TLR these days. I'm sure I'll trot it out again, maybe even for a little CLA. But now I'm a bit wiser.

Paul Sorensen · 06-04-2005, 09:23 AM

I had some house brand from Cambridge in New York. I think it was Russian, but I can't really remember. It had a Pentax screw mount lens and a light meter that was in front of the prism just above the lens. I have no memory of what happened to it, however. I do remember getting a Pentax MX a few years later which was my first camera that I really used.