First Cameras

These days we take hundreds of photographs, not only on cameras but also on our mobile 'phones. On a good walk around here I may take well over fifty often, as in the case of this heath spotted orchid, just to make sure that I have one good picture. By contrast, when I was a small boy, most people hardly took any, partly because of the cost but also because the quality was often disappointing.

The first camera I remember my family owning was a Kodak box camera but I first used this one, the family's Kodak Brownie 127. It had the advantage that anyone could operate it - all you did was point it in the right direction and press the white button. It was also better than the box Brownie because one lifted the viewfinder to the eye and it was therefore easier to compose the picture.

Having the film processed was relatively expensive so we tended not to use the camera much, though on the rare occasions we remembered to take it with us we seemed to go mad, taking several pictures of the same thing.

Unless in the hands of someone who knew how to compose a picture, the results were poor - one often had great difficulty in seeing the object of the picture. For example, this one was taken in Tsavo National Park and shows an elephant - if you can find it - in typical Tsavo bush land.

Despite their limitations, the pictures went into the albums Richard and I had, which accompanied us to England when we returned to school each September. They were meant, I suppose, to bring back happy memories of home, but I never looked at my album as the pictures hurt.

The first camera I owned was one I bought in Aden in 1963 when the Uganda, the BI ship aboard which I was travelling back to the UK after spending several months in Southern Rhodesia, called at Aden. Aden was famous for cheap electronic goods so I could afford a rather serious machine, a single-lens reflex camera made by Kowa. It was a stupid buy: I didn't know how to work the speed and exposure so, although some pictures came out well, many didn't - the one above, of the entrance to the Suez Canal, was one of my better efforts. Worse, the film and getting it processed were expensive - and then the camera began to malfunction. As a student, I could neither afford to replace it nor to buy a new one so I went without for some years, without it worrying me unduly. Today, if I'm without my camera, I worry that I might miss that one in a million picture which will make me.... famous?