A thing of beauty is a joy for … 83 years!
My 1938 Leica iiib with a 1950s Canon lens fitted
Hi and welcome to my first ever blog post on this site. I’ve had a presence for a while on YouTube, but I wanted to have somewhere where I could ramble on about photography and cameras without having to look my best, or even put clothes on at all - optional at home during lockdown- but not optional on YouTube! So dear reader you will never know if I have me trousers on or not for this!
I’m not one of those dyed-in-the-wool Leica fan boys who would use nothing else, or has been obsessed since popping from the womb, yelling: ‘give me my Leica M3 bi-atch’ (much to the surprise of the midwife). No, quite the opposite actually, for much of my photographic life - including the quite large bit where I got money for taking pictures - I saw Leicas as somewhat outmoded status symbols, brandished by ‘jolly nice chaps’ who likely wore tweed underpants and drove Morgan three wheelers. My weapons of photographic choice were motor driven Nikons and Mamiya medium format … German cameras seemed to belong to my father’s generation and so weren’t relevant or ‘hip’.
So what happened?
Well I started taking photographs on film again - after seeing out the latter years of my photo career on digital cameras - for a start. I also started to see virtue in simplicity - after wrestling with the god awful menu system in the Panasonic Lumix I use for shooting the video for my YouTube vlogs! I started to think about the environment … and there’s something wonderfully economical and carbon neutral about using a camera built while my mum was in nappies.
I bought a digital Nikon when digital was new … beautifully made, and sporting 6.1 megapixels of gorgeousness … it dented my bank balance by around £2000. One sold on eBay for sub fifty quid a couple of weeks ago. In 18 years my camera had become pretty much worthless; just like an 18 year old computer or a ‘Now That’s What I Call Music 53’ CD from the same year. All the industrial might that built the sensor and the pay for the stylists who designed the body … now just one small step from a back shelf at Cash Converters and one faulty component from landfill.
By this sad logic the Sony Alpha 1 mirrorless camera that has recently been released on the painful side of six grand (over £6000 pounds for those of you of the American persuasion) will someday in the not-too-distant future be available on eBay for close on bugger all! All flesh is grass you may think … such is the way of progress … but still my pre war Leica trucks on defiantly. The amazing thing is It’s worth as much now, relatively speaking, as it was when Neville Chamberlain went to Germany, gave Hitler carte blanch to large it up on Czechoslovakia and came home declaring "Peace in our time" like a total twat*.
The thing is, eighty three years after it was made it’s still every inch as good a camera as it was in 1938. Pop a 2021 film into it and it will deliver fully ‘professional results that nobody will poo poo through not having enough magic pixies … sorry megapixels. The strange bit is that a camera made 18 years ago, contributed images to newspapers, took pictures that graced the front of West End theatres like my digital Nikon did … is now seen as laughably primitive … as we peek at our 50+ megapixel images from the latest generation of ‘soon to be landfill’.
Is it just me or does all this ‘buying new stuff’ shit have to stop at some point? People bang on about analogue photography chemicals damaging the environment, but I’m actually more worried about all those lithium batteries and rare metals that come from making our latest man-toys. With a bit of extra research to improve photo chemicals analogue photography could easily be the green alternative to constantly watching our sexy new investments turn into bargain basement eBay fodder.
*Cameras got more bells and whistles but politicians are still pretty much still as stupid