I remember helping my dad set up for shots with his Mamiya C330 TLR, no match needle, he had a Gossen Luna Pro light meter (considered one of the best of its day) that I still have (although it is inoperable as it uses batteries that are no longer common). My job was to run to various spots and get the values from the light meter. Similarly, he had a flash meter that you used to make sure the flash was providing enough light and to figure out what exposure you were going to use as the Light meter just kind of overloaded with the flash 🙂 . Modern cameras with a dozen exposure modes, built in fill flashes and all the bells and whistles you could want are amazing, but some days the shots taken on 64 ASA Kodachrome on 2 1/4 ” 220 film on the TLR are still astounding. I wonder what my dad would think of my Cannon Rebel let alone a modern Hasselblad 2 1/4 at 100 Mpixel.
Orion's Cold Fire
All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
My parents had cheap Kodaks, they weren’t photographers by any stretch but they took a lot of snapshots. I 1st got “exposed” to what I considered to be real cameras, 35 mm SLR’s while in the military. I got a Minolta at the Base Exchange for about nothing, which was good since that’s about how much I made. The cost of film and processing really made me think before pushing the shutter. My wife gave the camera below to me as a Christmas present some time around the late 70’s, bless her. I put a lot of film through this… Read more »
My father was an avid photographer. He used photos in his work life but took lots of family pictures and made them into slides that he put up on a projection screen for us to see. But what we noticed was that in a not insignificant number of his pictures of people the tops of their heads were cut off. He took an enormous amount of ribbing about this but it never dulled his enthusiasm for the hobby.