Sunday, November 21, 2010

Picture of the week 11/15/10 Glass, Brass, and Chrome

My first SLR was a Konica Autoreflex. My father-in-law had one and I used it and liked it alot. When I decided to buy my own SLR I ran across a nice one at Eddie's. Eddies' was a little camera shop along side a flea market that stayed open when the flea market wasn't. I used to go there on cold Saturdays and deal with Eddie. Sometimes I'd get a better deal on days like that because I'd be the only one who came in and he'd rather make a lousy sale than no sale. Eddie's is long gone but the Konica is still in the family. The Konica's mirror is more left of center than most and being left-eyed it suited me. After Konica announced they were no longer going to make camera's I figured I'd better move to Nikon. Why Nikon? Because it is the professional's choice, of course. As I understand it, there was a time early on that if you were a professional photographer and used an SLR it was a Nikon. Period. Today that is not the case and there are plenty of arguments about Canon vs. Nikon. I own a Canon rangefinder and it is a wonderful camera. I own five Nikon SLR's.
I wound up with the collection above piece by piece. Flea markets, ebay, camera stores... when I had time and money I'd spend time collecting stuff I found on the cheap. The Nikkormat was Nikon's entry level line. They are built like tanks, actually, but had less features than the F cameras. You can see they had no hot shoe for a flash but they had two pc sync's (bulb and electronic flash) and you could get an accessory cold shoe. The shutter makes a neat little crunch sound right before the shutter actually fires. It's a specific Nikkormat thing. That groovy case has a metal plate in the bottom with the same lens mounting that the camera bodies have. You mount the lenses, in this case three spares, to that plate to keep them organized. Pretty cool system but the case loaded with a body and lenses is pretty heavy. The photo didn't take too long to do but I'm very happy with it. It has a very 70's magazine ad sort of look to it. This stuff is going on ebay as I have just too much stuff.

1 comment:

Grumpyunk said...

Happy Thanksgiving, Kid. Now get back to the Group W bench.