Your first camera

Mine was an East German Praktica Super TL (from looking at pictures ... something like, anyway). It was my Uncle's and it came with a 50mm prime lens which mine was stuck wide open. I still have the lens, which could be pressed into action with a collar on my Canon EOS.

I used to photograph in B&W, largely because colour film just wasn't all that ...

On those old Eastern Bloc lenses, there's some good stuff out there. After the Iron Curtain came down, the Soviets found themselves with a Karl Zeiss factory on their side. Copied many times and put into cheap as chips lenses which are a lot of fun to use today.

For a long time, I didn't have a (working) camera and didn't embrace digital until quite late on. I had a Fuji E500 for a good long while and took some cracking pictures with it. I was into food photography back then and would often get questions about my kit, to which I stunned inquirers with my answer.
There were some very good cameras from Russia. The Kiev 4 was a particular favourite, and, along with nested matryoshka dolls and Rollei lookalikes, in the 70's it could be bought from the Russian Shop in High Holborn.
 
Olympus XA2

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loaned to friend many years ago who managed to lose it somewhere in the Falkland Islands, well that her story and she was sticking to it.

I think my semiology/semiotics teacher had the same little camera back in the early nineties.
 
@Cristobal

Semiotics? Shit - were you taught by Umerto Eco? ha ha. I.

Funnily enough, at that time I asked him about Eco's novels (Foucault's Pendulum, my favourite book) and he advised me to read it backwards (from the last chapter to the first one); apparently he used to do that with The Lord of the Rings on a regular basis. It's supposed to give you a fresh look on the story, you might notice some new things that make sense, etc. Broadly speaking, he suggested to do that with your favourite books.
 
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Funnily enough, at that time I asked him about Eco's novels (Foucault's Pendulum, my favourite book) and he advised me to read it backwards (from the last chapter to the first one); apparently he used to do that with The Lord of the Rings on a regular basis. It's supposed to give you a fresh look on the story, you might noticed some new things that make sense, etc. Broadly speaking, he suggested to that with your favourite books.

Although one of his lighter reads - I really enjoyed Eco's 'The Name of the Rose.' Apart from his amusing habit of hiding important plot pointers in the chapter introductions rendered in medieval Latin. I always got the impression that - no matter where he was - Eco would be the most clever person in the room. Did reading books backwards work for you? I can see the logic. cheers - I.
 
Although one of his lighter reads - I really enjoyed Eco's 'The Name of the Rose.' Apart from his amusing habit of hiding important plot pointers in the chapter introductions rendered in medieval Latin. I always got the impression that - no matter where he was - Eco would be the most clever person in the room. Did reading books backwards work for you? I can see the logic. cheers - I.

You're right, Eco was a true humanist.

I haven't tried to read backwards yet, but in my opinion it's a very smart way to rediscover a book.

As for The name of the rose, it's the latin precisely that put me off. I did study it in high school though (4 years... Very useful when your mother tongue is a Romance language, even in English incidentally). Anyway when reading the novel, I didn't have the courage to translate dozens of paragraphs...
 
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Funnily enough, at that time I asked him about Eco's novels (Foucault's Pendulum, my favourite book) and he advised me to read it backwards (from the last chapter to the first one); apparently he used to do that with The Lord of the Rings on a regular basis. It's supposed to give you a fresh look on the story, you might notice some new things that make sense, etc. Broadly speaking, he suggested to that with your favourite books.
And here I thought Foucault's Pendulum was about the mysteries surrounding the invention of Kodak's Brownie Hawkeye. Now, for sure, I have to get my hands on Eco's book.
 
Back in high school I worked in the darkroom (early 1970's) for the school paper and year book. Was really into B&W photography. Saved up and got a Minolta SRT-101. It still took great photos up to 10 years ago - because that's when I lost it somewhere? To this day I can't figure (sadly) what the heck happened to it. Wished I still had it.
 
My first camera was Kiev-19 with a stock Helios 50mm lens, got it from my parents at around 14-15, and it had been my main camera until I got EOS 350D a few years later.
A very basic camera if you compare it with the likes of Nikon (it's also F mount, btw), but did everything I needed at the time, and compared to the rest of the Soviet-era cameras it was actually among the very best overall - very durable too, I remember shooting when it was -20C outside.
Used to experiment a lot with the b&w photo and darkroom, since I had a friend at a uni photo lab and could use it on occasion, but many of the films I shot were long expired Svemas, so results were peculiar at best. The only other B&W film available at the time was Kodak (C41), which was expensive (for a kid) and you'd have to be lucky to get it.
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My photo history: Voigtländer Bessamatic, Nikon F Photomic, Rollei 35 T or maybe it was S, Nikon F90X, then came digital and was I happy, no more film, no more developing, no more scanning, I have never looked back, better quality? nah! but so much more convenient...
 
I bought this wonderful Mamiya before going to Cuba in 1980. It remained my favorite handling camera for a long time. I forget what happened to it, I either donated it to a street kid project in Vietnam or it's well hidden in my Dad's garage.
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