Long ago and far away during the '46 occupation of Japan, my dad got a surplus 2 1/4 by 3 1/4 Speed Graphic in the army. He brought back some picture and the big camera & case all the stuff went in. In the '50's, he bought a Retina IIIc and the Speed Graphic didn't come out anymore.
I had a box camera or two from an excentric great aunt. (She was a hippie about 60 years head of her time.) My pictures weren't great, but I talked my dad into showing me how the Speed Graphic worked. It was a marvelous contraption, Camera, bellows, light meter, ground glass, and film holders. I shot some film packets with it. They had 10 or 12 shots of sheet film and a complicated paper system that moved the exposed sheet to the back of the pack when you pulled out the paper tab. But eventually Kodak stopped making the film packets and you had to load you're own sheet film in individual holders. That pretty much ended the camera's useful life. My sister has it now. Regards, Bob S. On Fri, 24 Dec 2004 12:17:39 -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Now that the subject's been changed a little, I'll reminisce ... > > Many Christmases ago -- thirty-two of them, I suppose -- an aunt gave me a > plastic box camera. Something along the lines of a Holga, I guess, though it > was actually named Pokey. I know this fer sure because I still have the lens > cap. Format was 6x45. > When my father noticed that the stiffness of the shutter release on said > plastic toy was causing all my pictures to suffer motion blur, he lent me one > of his cameras. This was a 120 folder, Monte Carlo by name, which he'd bought > new in 1947. It had no meter and no focusing aids (it did have a distance > scale and adjustable aperture and shutter speeds) and he set the exposure > controls to a likely all-purpose combination. When I was about 13, I was also > lent a selenium exposure meter and taught to read it. This also was 6x45 > format. > For Christmas 1979 my father gave me a Voigtlander Vito CLR (vintage early > 1960s). Wow! a built-in meter. Oh. It didn't work. Wow! a rangefinder! (Well, > at first that didn't work either but my dad fixed it.) I continued to use the > borrowed handheld meter. At some point I unfortunately dropped the meter ... > but my father was kind enough to lend me his other selenium meter for a few > weeks, then gave me one of my own. > In 1982 I won a cash prize in a photo competition (picture taken with > Voigtlander) and spent the prize on a Pentax K1000. This was my first camera > with a working in-camera meter. Part of the reason for choosing Pentax was > that my father owns screwmount stuff (I also bought an adapter). > Some years later the K1000 was stolen while on loan to my cousin and I > replaced it with a Sears KSX Super -- my first camera with both auto- AND > manual exposure. A while after that I bought an ME Super as a second camera, > and haven't been without a Pentax since. > As far as mechanical cameras without meters are concerned, in addition to the > Voigtlander with the dead meter I own a Yashica rangefinder, a Minolta > rangefinder and a Rolleiflex that never had meters. But I rarely use a > meterless camera these days. Last time I did, was a few weeks ago when my > father asked me to buy a Rolleiflex for him and I tested it. > > ERNR > >
