Pre-History (1980-1990)

I started taking an interest in photography back in around 1980/81. My first camera was a Practica MTL. By today's standards a very basic bit of kit, albeit quite solid. The only 'technical' bit on it was the light meter in the viewfinder! My photographic interests at the time were mostly landscapes really.

My first 'decent' camera was a Minolta X700 when it won the 'Camera of the Year Award' in 1983. I bought it new and collected several fixed lenses covering wide angle, short-telephoto for portraits (oh how I miss the 80mm F2) and a 300mm telephoto for wildlife. I still have the X700 and flash now, but with a macro zoom lens rather than the bag full of fixed lenses. You have no idea how heavy some of these old 35mm cameras can be, and that one was thought to be lightweight!

Also around this time I started to experiment with slide film and B/W, developing both myself in a home built darkroom housed in a wardrobe. Many happy (and frustrated) evenings spent sniffing chemicals in a darkened room - perhaps explains a lot eh? :-)

I had an interesting dabble in medium format photography around that time, with the purchase of a Mamiya C220 'TLR - Twin Lens Reflex' that I used for portraits and the occasional wedding.

During this time I worked for an engineering company in Lincoln. There I got involved in the Sports 7 Social Club where I started a Camera Club. I guess there were about a dozen guys turn up each month, and we had competitions, demonstrations, portrait studio sessions (where I would drag some friend along to model for us and let people use my gear).


This is an album of scanned images from that period. Not many, I might dig out some more one day when I repair the scanner :-)