Where it all started ........

The Super Kinax - The camera I used first - my dads before he got his first 35mm. These were of French manufacture between 1949 and 1952, this one with the "top of the range" Berthiot lens. More info 
Now my dad has passed away I now have this camera (pictured below) - as far as I can tell it is still fully functional. At f8 and 1/125th I'm sure it could still turn out a very passible image on "6x9" roll film.

Kinax interior 

The Minolta HiMatic 7s .

The 7s was a great little camera, very fast lens and really sharp. I put a lot of slide film through one in the late 1960's when I was at high school and later when I started work, mainly Kodachrome II and 64.

Then came the secondhand Nikkormat Ftn which lasted me all the way through from the mid 1970's to the mid 1980's although I do remember having to get repairs done to the metering system at great expense for the time. It was built to last and one of my friends said you could use one as a football and it wouldn't break.

That was followed in 1985 by the Nikon 301 Nikon F-301 which was a fantastic camera although without AF but it did have a built in three frames per second motor drive (but not rewind) running forever on four AAA cells. I liked it so much I bought a second body, both are still in good working order today.

Then came the digital age. At work we had a  Sony Mavica which used a 1.44mb "floppy" disk as its media (it could hold 30 or 40 images) and I guess was revolutionary in its time but not enough to tempt me away from film.

The office later had an early Fiji digital camera, I can't remember the model, but since all three we purchased across our regional offices developed faults and the service wasn't very good I was not  tempted in that direction either.

Then in 2002 Canon came out with the Power Shot G3, (DpReview) which in many ways felt a lot like a digital version of the HiMatic.  It got DPReview's "Highly Recommended" rating so I took the leap to digital. Lots of controls, light to carry, build like a tank, a fast lens and enough megapixels to do a presentable A4 print. Much later it developed a fault in the folding LCD which I repaired thanks to YouTube and a soldering iron!!

Mine is still working and it uses the same battery as my first DSLR the Canon 20D.

Then arrived my DSLR's, first the Canon 20D (2005) (DPReview) , the 50D (2008) (DPReview), the full frame 5Dmk2 (2010) (DPReview) and most recently I traded the mk 2 in on the  5Dmk4 (2016) (DPReview) which is by far the most versatile and advanced camera I've ever owned.

When I don't want to lug around something big or be a bit more discrete there is my trusty G16 (DPReview) which fits in your pocket. It still has a view finder (no LCD's are much good in bright sun) and lots of controls - very much the smaller smarter version of my old G3 and it has a battery that lasts forever. 

You can see the comparative sizes below (G16 lens retracts) !!

G16

Although there are some phone camera pictures on this blog (mainly the food ones) the rest have been taken with the G3, Canon DSLR's and the G16.

These days I use Photoshop CC, a far cry from the dark room, the smelly chemicals and the red light.