Hi. I'm just going to talk today about various cameras that I've had. I've been interested
in photography since I was quite small. When I was very small my mum had a little
Zorky with a 50mm lens and then when I was about six she got a Casina and
this was a 35mm SLR with a 50mm fixed lens, well not fixed lens but prime lens,
and a huge step-up in quality for her. It was her pride and joy and I remember when I was about six
going down to the Heraldwood Arcade in Peterborough and entering the Kampken shop. We went in there
several times before mum bought the camera and the smell inside there, sort of acetone and all
the processing chemicals from photography was there. It just had a wonderful aroma as you
walked into the Zork. It was all very white and there were sort of glass shells all the cameras
on and I don't think it was a particularly expensive camera in terms of what you could
actually buy, but in comparison with what my mum had previous to that I think they were like me.
Big step-up in quality and that camera lived in an old makeup case, an overnight
per case type thing that my mum had and that really sparked my proper interest in photography.
So when I was about sort of ten, I got a little 110 fixed focus camera. I remember the 110 cartridges
gave little tiny photographs sort of about three and a half by five and shortly after that I got
my first 35mm camera which was a Practica fixed focus compact and this had a motor drive. I didn't
use it a great deal if I'm truthful, but a few years later when I started to have a Saturday
job and I was about sort of 15 I went out and I bought myself the camera that my mother's
casino had been a copy of and that camera was this which is the Pentax P30. Now this is a P30A
which means it has an auto aperture function built into it. It's a beautifully made little
camera. I mean most of the body is made of brass, there's very little plastic on here and where it
hits it's a very high quality, but the best thing about this camera without a shadow of a doubt
is this. It's just the oleaginous, beautifully smooth focusing ring. It's just a tactile delight.
I can't describe to you how much pleasure this camera is to focus. It's just one of those things
that I still derive a great deal of pleasure about and I use this camera for my A level projects
and bits and bobs like that and then a few years later, I earned a little bit more money,
I went out and spent a sum of bonus from when I used to work at Boots on this camera here. Now
this is a Pentax MZ50 and for me it's a couple of firsts really. It wasn't the first motor
drive camera that I've had, but it was the first motor drive SLR that I own and it was also the
first autofocus camera that I ever owned as well. It comes with a 35-80 zoom, just a standard
Pentax job. Curiously though, and this is quite interesting because even though this camera,
let me think, would be 97-98 vintage, it still has, if you want it, a manual aperture ring. Now
I think that's quite unusual because by this stage majority of manufacturers had gone over to
having the auto aperture being built into the body of the camera, but this still gives you the
ability to select the auto or whichever aperture you felt was appropriate. So I think that's quite a
good thing. I used to use this with the Fuji Superior 800 films and it used to give the most
astonishingly brilliant colours. I never used any other type of film in that camera because just
this sheer vibrancy of colours that gave just knocked you out. And then for a while I didn't do
much in the way of photography and it all fell into the doll's drums and I was busy doing other
things, shall we say. In 2004 I moved down to Baselton, which is where I still am, into the
house that I'm sitting on the patio of now, and I was on my own and had an awful lot of spare time.
My interest in photography was sparked off again, yet again, by picking up the trusty old Pentax,
and I bought a battery, I got it working again, I put some films through and was really enjoying
the whole process of this. And in 2005 I started to take things a little bit more seriously.
In 2005 I was on eBay and bidding and I got this masterpiece of electronic trickery. This is a
Canon EOS 5. Now this was quite a highly advanced camera for its day, it was third in the time in
the Canon series. Had a couple of very neat features, neither of which actually have made it
into digital cameras, probably with good reason. The first one was the motorised flash. When you
take a photograph with the flash activated and uses the internal flash, a motor pulls the flash
up and then zips it back down again. This has a problem because of course the motor's used to burn
out. Now this one does work, I'm not going to demonstrate it by now, there's no film in the
camera, but rest assured this is a fully working model. The other thing it had was the ability to
track your eye through the eyepiece, and when you're looking through the viewfinder, if you weren't
a spectacle wearer like I am, there are five horizontally placed autofocus points and the
camera could tell, once you've trained it, it could tell which of those spots you were looking at
and it would focus accordingly. A fantastically advanced camera for its day, very quick of a
five frames per second or something like that, and bearing in mind with a film that's tearing
on a fair old pace. Wonderful to use and I used this camera when I went to Italy in 2005 with my
mate Adam. We drove down through France and Switzerland into Italy and stayed in a place called
Monticchiari and we explored all over, more than Italy in the lakes. We visited Modena and we
also went to the old 1990s Bugatti factory where they used to make the EV110. Now while we were
outside the gates of that trying to work out what we could do to get in, abandoned factory,
the gates opened and a chap came out in a small fiat and saw us standing there with a camera
beckoned to us and sort of, he could speak no English, we could speak no Italian and somehow
conveyed to us to follow him. So we did and we were bombing through the back streets of the
town, I can't remember which town it was now, and we came to an old industrial estate and came
through some shuttered doors and bang! There, sitting there, was the prototype Bugatti EV110
and this blew us away. We got to sit in it, we had all the engine components laid out,
a company called Adonis had taken over all the non-used shells and we're building them up with
a slightly different bodywork and selling them on and just a phenomenal thing, just a moment of
luck, you know, someone saw we were car enthusiasts and just took us on a tour of the factory,
just an amazing trip. The rest of the time wasn't as exciting as that, that was really
was the highlight of the 10 days that we spent there, but there were many other things that
we did that were quite fun. But yeah, so because on that day I had this camera and got shots of
the various engine components and of me sitting inside the prototype EV110, this camera will
always hold a place in my heart and even though I spent 250 quid on it in 2005, and it's probably
worth about 15 quid today, I have to be honest with you, I don't see myself ever getting rid of it.
Now at the same time, my collecting went a little bit into overdrive and what it did then was I got
this little dual. Now this is a Rolly 35 LED, a wonderful premium compact camera, probably the
first and maybe even the last of its type and what it does is it has a little fold-out lens
that locks into place, you've got your focus at the very front, you have your aperture on the next
ring and then your shutter speed on the ring closest to the body. It's a marvel of engineering,
it really is. There were various different versions made, the LED was the very final one,
so in the viewfinder it would tell you whether your exposure was correct. If you had a flash,
the shoe is actually on the bottom of this particular camera and the flash just extends
out from beneath, which is quite an interesting feature, and again I don't think it's been seen
on many things. I tend to pick up cameras that have got features that are quite unusual as you
can probably see. I love this camera, but I've only ever really used it once or twice and the
main time I used it was when I went to a classic car show at Alexandra Palace in North London,
and it has some really good photos and it's got a very good, if you whack it wide open,
you can get an excellent sort of drop-off and clarity in the background just to spring things
forward, even though it's all guesswork, but great fun, enormously fun camera. I paid about
45 quid for it back in 2005, it's probably worth more than that now, but it's not in bad condition
and one of those cameras that you pick up along the way. The same year I took that final step in
the autumn, there was a special offer on and I bought a Canon 300D. Now I can't show that to you
because I sold that on to my brother when the following year I bought a Canon EOS 20D and again
I can't show you that camera, although I did own it up until very recently, in fact it was only
sold on last October. That was a great camera, but I tend to see it under-exposed very slightly
and the colour that I used to get out of the camera I felt was slightly inferior to that of from the
300D, so I was never 100% happy with it and last year in April I crossed my fingers because I was
getting more into videography and I bought a 550D. At the moment I'm using this with my Sigma EX
50mm f2.8 macro, which I find to be the best quality lens I'll actually own and the 50mm lens
actually works quite well as a portrait and for static shots like this, although at the moment
I'm looking at buying perhaps a 35mm Sanyam because the reviews I've read of those are excellent,
it's a big bulky lens but f1.4, so even if it's usable at f2 I can certainly get a little bit
more light into that and the results that I've seen so far as far as video is concerned are
excellent, so I'm very tempted to go down that route, but for the time being the 550D is my current
camera and we'll say that way for a little while until perhaps something comes along that's significantly
better, maybe with 2K or 4K footage, we'll have to see.
