Darren Rouse over at Digital Photography School recently asked the question, “What was your first photography experience?”.
My first experience was borrowing my mother's Instamatic (don't recall if it was a genuine Kodak or a ‘Boots-the-Chemist' branded camera).
The Kodak Instamatic was a simple to use snapshot camera. Using 35mm film pre-loaded in a drop-in cartridge it was simple to use and rare to fail. The images it produced were square. Kodak also provided the Magicube flash cube that gave four flash bulbs cube that snapped on the top of the camera and rotated to load a new flash bulb as you wound the film.
On YouTube there's a one-minute ad clip of the Instamatic and Flash Cubes – return to the Swinging Sixties anyone?
We often took slides with the camera, not that the camera, with its fixed focal length lens, was really up to the job. The image below, taken in August 1967 shows my sister, me (age four-and-a-half) in the middle, and my brother with our dog, Benny. I don't know the name of the worker in the background. Like the family snapshots of many, there's too much sky and our legs are cut off, caused no doubt by taking the picture at adult standing eye level and not crouching down to our height. The parallax of the viewfinder would not have helped either. The large wooden building in the background burned down in the early hours of July 21, 1969, the result of an act of vandalism. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were taking their first steps on the moon around the time when the fire was started.
And below is another image of me sitting on my (semi) toy wheel barrow while my grandfather trims the hedge. I've recovered the image somewhat by over-sharpening but, again, it shows the limitation of the camera.
So this type of 126 Instamatic was also the first camera I got to use – being allowed to take it on school field trips was a great privilege. Most of the images I ran through it were on color negative film but suffered much the same from the limits of the format and fixed focal length lens. It would be 1978 before I would buy my first SLR camera – a Zenit EM – but that's for a future post.
