Phew, is this ever going to end? Well, not yet, not today. Here goes again.

I’m going to jump back a few years to 2008, when I decided to make the trip of a lifetime to Paris and the UK. It was sparked by a meeting with an old school friend from Northam, now living in Scotland and visiting Perth. She spoke to our crowd at a reunion and said, “If anyone’s coming to Scotland, please visit and stay with me.” I didn’t think it would be possible at the time (2005), but as I thought about it, I thought, “Yeah, let’s do it.” So I set about planning the trip.

Of course, the planning of what camera gear to take is part of the pleasure for me. I love it! I need full capability, especially very wide angle to cope with taking photos in cathedrals and confined spaces. But also long telephoto for landscapes and the possibility of wildlife.

I already had the Canon 40D shown above and elected to take only the Sigma 10 – 20mm for its wide angle capability. The Canon crop factor is 1.6x, therefore the focal length range for this lens is 16 – 32mm, not as good as 10-20 but pretty good all the same.

I figured if I needed anything different, I could buy it in London, probably second hand. But I didn’t buy anything until near the end of the trip. Which see.

So my travelling kit was the 40D, the Fuji s100fs, the Sigma 10-20mm for the Canon and that was it. Quite a small complement for my way of working. Oh, plus a Canon HD video camcorder. That’s a separate story.

I made the decision that I had to shoot video, for this trip of a lifetime. Stills cameras didn’t shoot video then (they do now), so I wanted to buy a proper video camera. I chose a Canon model (I can’t remember the model number now), and the best price was at a Brisbane, actually Gold Coast, seller.

I’d wanted to visit my Brisbane relatives for some years, so I thought, here’s the opportunity to go to Brisbane, collect the video camera (I’d paid on-line), and visit my relatives at the same time.

It was a great trip. I rented a sporty version of the Toyota Camry and drove from the airport, down to the Gold Coast to a little warehouse type of shop, up a staircase, then driving through all the mountain roads to my relatives’ place near Beenleigh. It’s a beautiful part of the world up there.

Then it was back to Perth for a day or two, then off to Singapore, first, for a couple of days. Then off on Sri Lankan Airways to Paris, via Colombo and Abu Dabhi. Why Sri Lankan? They flew to Paris, they had stops to stretch your legs, and the price and timing were right. It was a good flight. A 747 too.

I stopped in Paris for five days and I got sunburnt in northern hemisphere September. Paris is very photogenic.

Then I had a ticket on the Eurostar, to London via the Chunnel. I was excited about that. So I bowled up to the station att 8am on the day, only to find that all Chunnel trains were cancelled due to a fire in the tunnel. Bugger!!

So they laid on a bus for us and it was a full day’s trip via the car ferry to Dover, then train to London. A full day’s trip, wasted.

Anyway, I found my camera complement to be pretty good. It was heavy and my bag was pretty big, but I’m a sucker for punishment.

I went to stay with a school friend in Scotland, who lived right near the Isle of Skye and the Eileen Donan Castle. Couldn’t have been better.

To summarise, I shot more than 1,000 still images and about 1,000 video clips in 1080 30p resolution. I was a bit paranoid about losing all this material, so every evening I would take the SD cards, three of them, copy them to my laptop, then burn them to CDs. After carefully labelling them, I posted them next day to my sister in Perth for safe keeping. I’d email her to say they were coming. I’ve still got all this material on a hard drive, but it’s failed! I’ve still got the discs somewhere, so I’m not bovvered, but one-o’these days I’ve got to either fix that drive myself, or pay to get it fixed.

I think I’d better close this chapter before it gets too long. More coming.

Here I am again with yet more camera history. Not finished yet, not by a long shot.

In 2010 I was off on a big trip to Bali and being a bit flush at the time, and based on an excellent review from my favourite blogger, I decided to buy Pentax, specifically the new Pentax K-5 digital.

It’s not a huge sensor, only 16Mpixel, but the review talked about the particularly nice pictures and I’ll confirm that.

_{Baby kookaburras 2012, Pentax DA 50-200mm © PJ Croft 2024}

I bought the camera and the 18 – 55mm (27 – 82mm eq.) plus the 50-200mm (75 – 300mm eq.) lenses in one purchase before the Bali trip in 2011.

_{Pentax K-5 images © PJ Croft 2024}

I liked the camera very much, I still have it and I won’t part with it (except to update to the K-3 mk. 3, but it’s very expensive). I soon added a Sigma 120 – 400mm f4 and a Sigma 10 – 20mm f4. Yes, the same lens I had had for the Canon 40D. I sold all my Canon gear in one hit at a bargain price to the son of a friend. I think I was too generous, but it can’t be helped now.

I’ve since added the Sigma 18 – 135mm (27 – 200mm eq.) which I bought on Facebook Market for $50. Can’t go wrong, can you? So I’m covered for every focal length from 15mm to 600mm, but wow, it’s heavy! Too heavy to carry in one bag/trip.

_________________________________________________

But my restless eyes soon tired of this and as a dedicated reader of reviews, I next decided to venture into the Olympus 4/3 system, specifically the OM-D E-M1.

This new camera got rave reviews and I’d tend to agree, it’s an exceptional camera. But I’ve found a few drawbacks. It’s mainly the menu system and a strange switch on the back that I still haven’t fully understood. Since I bought the camera in 2014, that’s pretty slack of me, but ……

Re the menus, wow, so many options! You almost need to carry a printed guide with you. One reviewer did publish a “Start here” list, which has helped a lot, but I admit I don’t use the camera a lot because of its complexity. However, its image stabilisation (sensor movement) is amazing. Up to seven stops of improvement. That means you could hand-hold the camera at 1/15sec. and it would be as if you were using 1/2000sec. I can vouch for its low light capability.

The camera came with the standard Olympus M.Zuiko 14-42mm lens. It’s OK, but annoying in the way it has a locking mechanism when the zoom is retracted, and you have to unlock it before you can shoot. I hate that. It also came with a tiny accessory electronic flash in a velvet pouch, which, considering the incredible low light perforamnce, I don’t think I’ve ever needed.

Later, I bought the M.Zuiko 14-150mm M.Zuiko do-it-all zoom (28 – 300mm equiv.). It’s a useful travel lens, but no great performer. I also bought an Olympus M.Zuiko 75 – 300mm lens (150 – 600mm equiv.). It’s a very sharp lens.

Then I got into the smaller Pen series, buying a PL-2.

And then one day Dick Smith advertised E-PL3s with 14-42mm lens for about the price of the lens alone. I couldn’t resist!

This came with another small flash in velvet pouch, so that’s two I’ve got now, and I never use them.

This was gettin’ serious. All this Olympus gear, on top of the older OM-2 body and a couple of original lenses.

_________________________________________________________

Next was a Sony, but a fixed lens travel camera, the RX10, which has a 20Mpixel sensor:

Again, I fell for this camera on the basis of glowing reviews, and I haven’t been disappointed. It”s great! Immediately that I started to shoot pictures, the sharpness of the lens was very noticeable, even on the camera’s own screen. This was 2014.

It’s quite a heavy camera and I admit that puts me off using it. But the menus are good, easy to follow, and the results are brilliant.

_____________________________________________________________

Wow, I was accumulating cameras and lenses. I ain’t finished yet, but I’d better post this and start on the next installment. Stay tuned.

___________________________________________________________________

My memory has been failing me slightly. In the 1990s or early 2000s, I bought a Canon G9:

I liked this camera very much and had good results with it:

I kept this camera for a couple of years and then decided to sell it to a mate who liked it. But there’s a very funny story here – he took the camera with him on a camping trip and had the battery out on charge overnight. But he left the battery compartment door open on the table.

Next day he started using the camera again and noticed a shadowy thing in the bottom left corner. It took a while but he eventually worked out that it was a worm! A worm had crawled into the camera sensor chamber through the battery compartment during the night!

So how do you get a worm to come out again? Answer: you can’t. Eventually it stopped moving and died. But it was still visible in the pictures.

He showed it to me and I said I’d have a go at getting it out. After all, we had nothing to lose, as even if I buggered it up, the camera was unusable anyway.

So I dismantled it as much as I could, went as far as I dared, but it was no use, I couldn’t get at it. I tried hard, but I had to call a halt as I just couldn’t see how to get any further in dismantling it or damaging it.

The main thing I remember about this process was the electric shocks I got from the flash capacitor in the camera. Yow! Ouch! I managed to get two shocks a few days apart and I still remember them, ten years later.

________________________________________________________________

Anyway, my next purchase was a Ricoh Caplio GX100. Why? It was getting very good reviews on a web site I trusted.

This is a very highly regarded pocketable camera, short lens, very high quality, reduced size 10 megapixels sensor, with image stabilisation.

I don”t remember why but I soon disposed of this camera by donating it to my mate KG at the time. He had done me some favours and I felt an obligation. He used it for a few years but I saw it and it’s in a sorry state. He complained that things didn’t work, but crumbs, it was bashed around. No wonder.

__________________________________________________________________

In the meantime, I’d fallen under the spell of Canon and their Ultrasonic focusing lenses. Wow, near silent AF. I was hooked. In 2007 I bought a Canon 40D SLR in Singapore, with a 28 – 105 US AF lens.

I think I also bought a Canon 75-300mm lens at the same time, although I sold that lens on to a friend. He had a burglary and it was stolen from him. Sigh. Meantime, I had bought the Canon 28 – 105mm Ultrasonic in Singapore and found it to be a very nice combination of focal lengths.

But I was planning a trip to the UK via Singapore and Paris, where I knew I would need very wide angles for pics in cathedrals, and so I also bought a Sigma 10 – 20mm super wide angle zoom for it. I was very happy with that lens, and more on that later. I actually sold the Canon one and bought the same lens for Pentax, which I still have. TBC.

__________________________________________________________________

I still wanted another camera for my trip and Fuji brought out a new camera just at the right time. I was hooked. It was the Fujifilm S100fs, where ‘fs’ stood for film simulation.

This was a fixed zoom lens camera, only 11 Mp, but the zoom was 28 – 400mm and image stabilised, an ideal range. And since I was a Fujichrome user, the film simulations were ideal.

So for the trip, I carried the Canon 40D with the Sigma 10 – 20mm fitted, and the Fujifilm S100fs. I thought that covered the range I needed, but if I found I wanted more, the UK was a cheap place to buy. The one thing I wanted to buy, and did, was a tripod. I had a particular model in mind, one with twist lock legs, but in practice I didn’t like it. I found the twist locks to be too slow and wanted to go back to snap locks, so once I got back to London, I traded the tripod in on a new lens for the Canon, a Sigma 28 – 200mm. NB: I also took a Canon video camera with me, capable of Full HD video, so my bag was full each day and quite heavy.

I’ve been extremely happy with the Fujifilm S100 and I still have it on my shelf. I don’t want to part with it. It’s a cropped sensor (smaller than APS-C) and only 11Mp, which sounds like a problem, but I’m very happy with the raw images at 3867 x 2913 pixels. Below is a “worked” RAW image, saved as a TIFF.

I must admit I was also very pleased to get back to the Canon sometimes, with its near full sized sensor, optical viewfinder and familiar controls.

To be continued.

Did you think I was finished? Ha, no way, lots to come.

I left off in the last post in the early 1990s just after the burglary that cleaned me out. All my Olympus and Nikon gear was lost. Damned thieves! So I set about rebuilding my system(s).

I had always been a bag man and I had my favourite – it wasn’t anything fancy, just a cheap blue bag, but to me it was the perfect bag, almost. It just had four compartments, with two pockets on the ends. Very light, but most impoertantly, the straps folded right over the top without being attached to the top flap. This meant that you could pick up the bag without it tilting over, one of the things I’ve always looked for.

The drawbacks were (a) it used Velcro for the top closure, and (b) it used metal clips and rings to hold the top closed. Both of these made noise! One thing I didn’t want when stalking birds out on a lake or in the bush was sudden noises, and opening that bag top meant “r-i-i-i-p”, or jingle, jingle, jingle of metal on metal. Still I loved that bag and surprisingly, after a couple of years, I found another one, identical, $20. Done deal!

Surprisingly, before I found the replacement, one day at work I saw a woman photographer working in Studio 1 at Channel 7, and blow me down, she had what looked like my bag. Identical. I was so dumbfounded that I was silly enough to make a comment that it looked like my stolen one. Naturally, she got her back up and emphatically said it was hers and implied that I should go away.

Anyway, I soon bought a Nikon F-601 to replace the F-801.

This was a cheaper version of the F-801 with a few nice additions, but a different shutter, nowhere near as nice sounding. It also had a pop-up flash in the prism area, which I liked. I quite liked this camera, but it wasn’t as nice as the F-801. It was all I could afford at the time.

I had the 50mm lens that came with it, and the 28mm Series E. I also found another Nikon Series E 75-150 f4, almost my favourite lens. Very sharp. So I was on my way again, especially as I bought the 300mm f4 IF ED and the new s/hand 200mm Micro Nikkor that I found in Sydney. Wha-hey, I was building a system again.

I also found a s/hand Olympus OM2 SP, so that got me going in Olympus again, nowhere near what I had before, but a start. As I say, I’ve still got that amera, complete with an unfinished roll of Fuji Provia in it. One o’these days I’ll finish it!

_________________________________________________________

Time moved on and I continued to make trips to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Fraser’s Hill in Malaysia, and Penang. Fabulous! I loved travelling in those areas.

It’s a bit hard to remember the late 1990s, but in October 1999 I took the offer of a voluntary redundancy from my workplace and retired. At age 52. A good payout saw me never having to work again, except for voluntary part time work at my old job. Ideal!

I remember feeling the absolute freedom to travel, without needing to scrimp and save, being able to stay in four star hotels rather than two or three star. And to buy my heart’s desires in cameras. I didn’t go wild, not at all, just a bit less restricted.

In particular, I had not yet moved to digital. I had a Nikon LS-4000ED film scanner, meaning I cold scan a frame of film to a 4000 x 3000 pixel digital image. I used to say, why do I need a digital camera (when 4-6Mpixel was the state of the art then) when I have a 12Mpixel device to scan my film?

So on a trip to Singapore around 2000 or 2001, I bought a camera I had lusted after, the Contax G2 with its Zeiss 35mm Sonnar lens. Second hand in Singapore.

I think it cost me about $800, and the 28mm lens was about $400. It’s a very unusual camera – a rangefinder, but autofocus camera. Titanium body, made in Japan by Kyocera (Yashica) for German Contax. Lens made in Germany.

Of course, that wasn’t enough and on the same trip I bought a s/hand G1 as well, and a 35mm Zeiss lenns, and the 90mm Zeiss as well. And the accessory flash. The G1 was the first model in this new range, succeeded by the G2 obviously.

It turned out that when I tried to use the 35mm on the G1, it wouldn’t work. Can’t remember exactly why but the shop told me there was an official mod needed. Go to the service centre in XXX industrial suburb, they told me. So, taxi there, please wait while it’s done, that’ll be $50 (??) please, and there’s a small green sticker in the film compartment to show it’s done. Taxi back to the hotel.

Wow, was I pleased with this purchase! I had spent about $1500 and I figured it would be worth at least $2,000 in Perth if I got tired of it. So I figured I was pretty safe.

Well, my experience has been terrrible. For one thing, the autofocus requires you to centre a small circle in the centre of the viewfinder on the subject before it will try to focus. This means I don’t think I’ve had a single sharp image in the whole time I’ve owned the cameras! It’s too hard. I’ve seen plenty of beautifully sharp images on the Web, but I can’t get these cameras to do it for me.

So I’ve found a way to adapt the Zeiss lenses to a modern Sony digital camera. More of that anon.

That leads me to my first real digital camera, the Konica Minolta A2.

This was a lovely camera and I’ve still got mine. Only 8Mpixels but that seemed enormous in 2004.

This was a fixed lens camera, so there was no buying extra lenses. It was a 28 – 200mm manual zoom, ideal for me. I liked it very much. I bought it at a camera shop at Whitfords City in Perth. I can still remember the frustration of having to wait for the battery to charge before I could use it (about 3-4 hrs), and the remark by someone about “Wow, 8 megapixels!” as that was a lot in those days.

That got me through a long time before I bought my next digital camera. I spent months digitising all my Japan Fuji Reala negatives from my 1992 trip and I loved the results. This was around 2005 I think, in the first few years after I retired, as I had all the time in the world. There were about 350 images.

I’m struggling to remember my next digital camera. I know that I bought an Olympus OM-D E-M1 in about 2014:

This is a beautiful camera, but boy it’s hard to learn its use. Switches everywhere and complex menus. But the image stabilisation is magic. This was Olympus’s first Micro 4/3 sensor camera. This was a cropped (reduced size) sensor in the 4×3 proportion. It has the huge benefit that there are adapters to allow the use of almost any lens from any maker. I’ve got an adapter to fit the Minolta 250mm mirror lens that I mentioned in part three to this camera, with the benefit of doubling the focal lenght to 500mm with brilliant image stabilisation. I love it!

It came with a 12-24mm “collapsible” zoom lens and a tiny flash, (which I’ve hardly ever used). I’ve since bought an Olympus 75-300mm M. Zuiko, which is equivalent to a 150-600mm in 35mm terms. It’s a lovely sharp lens.

To be continued. Lots more to come!

Did you think I was finished? I hope I’m not boring you but there is much, much more to come.

When I left off in the last post, I was into Olympus OM and wow! The OM system in the 1980s and 90s was incredibly well designed, extensive and desirable. And through scouring the second hand shops in Perth, I built up a big collection.

I only ever had the OM2 Spot/Program body, just the one, but as I said, I had 18mm, 21mm, 28mm, 50mm and 135mm Zuikos, which were renowned for their smallness and sharpness, and I can vouch for that. I’ve still got the 28mm but lost the rest to a burglary in 1990. More on that later.

Olympus’s flash and macro system was the best on the planet and I lusted after all of it. I never bought their actual macro lenses, but by using highly corrected dioptre lenses (ie +1, +2 and +3 close-up lenses, as they were called), with the Olympus flashes I bought, I was able to get excellent results.

I have, or had, nearly all these things. Wow, I loved the thrill of the chase. It wasn’t just Perth, I was hunting in the shops in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur as well.

One thing I did, after I got into Nikon (which see), was to use a T-adapter to adapt a Micro Nikkor 200mm macro lens to the Olympus OM2 SP body. Why? To be able to use the Olympus’s flash system with the 200mm reach of the Micro Nikkor. It was unweildy, but it worked. Sure, you couldn’t focus to infinity, but you didn’t need to – this was close-up work.

Here’s a shot I took with this setup, i.e. the 200mm Micro Nikkor mounted on the OM2 SP body with an Olympus T32 flash held out to the side on a coiled cord. All the while trying to keep my feet in a muddy jungle grove near Fraser’s Hill in Malaysia.

© PJ Croft 2024

As I say, I still have the OM2 SP body, with a roll of Fuji Provia slide film still in it, waiting to be finished!

___________________________________________________________

Nikon time …

It had to come. I had talked about my gear with other guys at work who were also into cameras, although no-one was as obsessed as me, and people repeatedly asked me why I didn’t use Nikon, one of the top two brands at the time. I said it was because:

• I didn’t have any Nikon lenses at the time, except the 200mm Micro Nikkor

• I had never liked the way the lenses worked in reverse, i.e. anticlockwise twist to mount, and anticlockwise turn to focus. The opposite of all the cameras I’d had up to then.

• It was an expensive system, although very high quality.

Eventually, I bought a 55mm Micro Nikkor from a pawn shop in Perth. Scatched front element, but for $75 I took a chance (and it was good). Well, that made two Nikon lenses, so I had to have a body, and in about 1986 I bought an FE2.

Auto exposure (aperture priority) but AF wasn’t a thing then. Lovely camera, wonderful shutter sound. I loved it.

Then around 1989, this was released. Wow, I had to have it.

I bought it in 1989 for a trip that Geoff Williams and I did. This was still film days, remember. This was my first autofocus camera, although I only had one AF lens, if I remember correctly, the 50mm AF that came with it. But I still had the 200mm Micro and I also bought a Nikon Series E 70-150 which became almost my favourite lens. The Series E lenses were Nikon’s cheaper lenses to go with their Nikon EM (“economy model”?). But they were extremely high quality lenses, especially the 28mm which I sold to a friend. She loved it.

I also had my 55mm Micro Nikkor (Micro was Nikon’s way of saying macro). It was in a pawn shop in Hay St for $75 and had seen better days. In particular, it had a few small scratches on the front element (how they could do this is beyond me, considering how deeply recessed the front element is). Anyway, in view of the legendary status of this lens, I decided to take the risk, and I’m glad I did. Here’s an example shot with it:

From then on, I used both systems, the Olympus and the Nikon. I also bought a beautiful 300mm f4 IF ED Nikon lens, below. (IF stood for Internal Focusing, meaning the glass elements moved within the lens, so the length didn’t change as you focused. ED stood for Extra Dispersion, i.e. special glass to minimise aberrations.)

This lens cost about $2,000 I think, but to me, it made me feel professional. I was heavily into bird photography and landscapes.

I think the F-801 was the best handling camera I had ever used. The buttons just fell under my fiingertips, I didn’t have to think about what I was doing, it came naturally. I got some of my best shots ever on that trip to Java using this camera.

Disaster!

Then in 1989, I arrived home from work one night at about 11.30pm to find a front window jemmied open and a big lot of my possessions missing. In the lounge room, my Technics SL-P1 CD player and my Nakamichi cassette deck. Also my entire collection of around 100 CDs were taken.

In the bedroom, all three camera bags with all my equipment were gone. A wooden vintage camera was smashed. I was very upset, as you can imagine. All those items above – gone! All the small adapters, rings, filters lost. Years of collecting.

Obviously I called the police the next morning. They came and sniffed around, writing a report, but I didn’t expect any return of my things and I wasn’t wrong. I said something to the effect of “I’d better take precautions in case they come back.” No, they won’t come back, said one of the coppers.

Well guess what – they did, about three months later (see below).

Luckily, I was properly insured and I got a full payout, but it depended on me recalling all the things that had been taken. I did have serial numbers of a lot of the gear, but not all, and for months and years afterwards, I was recalling items that were missing but I’d forgotten about. Not too many, luckily.

However, the insurance company insisted that to maintain my insurance, I had to have a burglar alarm fitted. So I did. It was a full professional job, about $1,000 worth, I think, and it was very effective. More than once, I accidentally triggered it and lived to regret it. It was LOUD!

The Rebuild

From then on, having the insurance money, I set about rebuilding, buying second hand. One thing was – all my CDs, I recalled from my memory. Yes, it took me a few days, but I was able to build the list in my mind and write it all down. CDs had value then – no-one wants them now.

The Return of the Burglars

Despite the policeman’s reassurance that “They won’t come back”, I got home from work one evening to find the sliding glass door to my bedroom smashed to smithereens. Luckily it was afety glass and just smasshed into small pieces, but it meant my house was open to the world. They’d used a jemmy on the lock and it was torn out of the brickwork, but I was able to fix that.

But nothing was taken. I think the alarm must have done its job and scared them out immediately. Good work. I didn’t have dogs then either.

So from then on, I slowly rebuilt a system, not exactly the same, no Nikon bodies, no 300mm, but I did find an Olympus OM2 SP second hand in a camera shop in London Court and bought that. Then, on a holiday in Sydney in the ’90s, I found another 200mm Micro Nikkor in a Sydney camera shop and couldn’t resist it. It cost $800. I know, because it cleaned me out of the money I’d allocated to rent a car and do some touring. Oh well, at least I had a solid asset in my hand instead of money “wasted” on car rental and hotels.

To be continued – the digital age!

It rained yesterday! To my eastern states or overseas readers, that might sound silly, but it’s the first serious rain (more than just a ten second sprinkle) in three months. This has been a record hot dry summer in Western Australia. This is global heating at work, folks.

It’s particularly serious here in WA as we’ve lost around 20% of our annual rainfall on a permanenet basis, since 1977. I can remember noticing that year and how dry the summer was. We used to have adequate dams, which filled reliably every winter, for our water needs. No more. Most of our dams are only 30-50% full and have no hope of suppllying the needs of a city of 2 million people who need to pour water on lawns and gardens.

Our main water supply comes from underground now, but even that’s becoming depleted as it’s not being replenished by the low rainfall. It’s very much supplemented by hugely expensive seawater desalination plants. We have two already and a third is being built now, just up the highway from me, actually.

Anyway, back to more interesting stuff. Cameras!

_______________________________________________________

After the Pentax departed, I thought I’d found my forever camera, the Minolta XD7.

Wow, I thought I’d hit the jackpot. I loved the looks, I loved the feel, I loved the multi-mode operation. It was an aperture priority/shutter priority/program/manual camera, all the things I liked. I can’t remember how I got it – I think I bought it new on one of my many trips to Singapore in the late ’70s.

I started a small collection of lenses, the 50mm standard lens, a Rokkor (Minolta’s brand) 35mm which I still have, a Rokkor 100mm (which I didn’t like and sold to a guy at work). And most especially, the beautiful Minolta RF Rokkor 250mm f5.6 mirror lens, which I still have right here.

The thing about this lens is that it was so small and light that I thought I could hand-hold it without camera shake. But I couldn’t. It was deceptive. I don’t think I ever got a sharp image hand holding it. Even so, I loved using it. Mirror lenses were a big thing in the ”80s and I also owned a Tokina 500mm f8 mirror lens. That was a heavy lens and the weight actually assisted hand-holding. More on that later.

I hold onto the Rokkor 250mm lens these days because things have changed. You can get lens mount adapters now and I’ve got an adapter from Minolta to my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Digital Micro-4/3 camera. This doubles the focal length to 500mm, but crucially, gives me excellent, amazingly good image stabilisation, meaning I can hand hold to my heart’s conntent. And it’s digital!

I also bought a second hand Minolta XE-1:

And I also bought my heart’s desire, a Minolta XM. This was Minolta’s attempt to get the professionals to buy into the Minolta system, (but it was never successful). It’s built as if you could use it to hammer nails.

I still have it! It’s big, it’s heavy but it’s beautiful. Titanium shutter curtains. Interchangeable (removable) prisms. Interchangeable focusing screens. I’ve still got this camera. When I initially bought it, mine had a plain prism, i.e. no light metering. No problem, I used a hand held meter. But I spent literally years looking for a full metering prism as shown above, and finally I found one, second hand, of course, in the camera shop in Forest Place in Perth (before Myer was built, demolishing that whole block of shops). It cost me $150 for the prism but I was rapt! I’ve still got it, and I thought this camera would appreciate in price, as it was always a prestigious camera. Unfortunately, it’s depreciated badly and is only worth about $100 now, the whole thing! However, I still have the 35mm and the 250mm lenses, so I can still play around with it. But film has become so expensive and so inconvenient that I would never bother with it now. Pride of ownership only.

So I had quite a big Minolta system in about 1978 or so. Why did I switch away? Shutter shock in the XD7. That’s when the action of the shutter mechanism in the camera induces camera shake, and that’s what I was discovering. My images weren’t sharp. I can’t exactly remember what I did with the whole system – probably sold it to a guy at work.

______________________________________________________

I left off at the Pentax Super A. I was very fond of that camera, so why did I go away from it? Two reasons, (a) a friend wanted to buy it; and (b) I lusted after an Olympus OM camera. It was mainly for the Olympus OM system of macro and flash stuff. It was by far the best in those days, the 1980s. So I sold the Pentax and Minolta and bought an Olympus OM2 Spot Program (OM2 SP), which I still have, although it’s not the same one. More on that later. It’s still got a film in it, too, awaiting me finishing the roll and taking it for processing!

I should add that this was a time when duty free (tax free for overseas travellers) cameras were quite low priced in Australia for some reason (strong Australian dollar, tax 33.3% I suppose) and I only paid about $145 for this camera, brand new. I was rapt!

I quite soon started to build a system and I was finding used Olympus equipment in the thriving second hand windows of shops in Perth. I soon found 18mm, 21mm, 28mm, the 50mm that came with the body, and 135mm genuine Zuiko lenses. In addition, I bought a Sigma 50 – 200mm APO zoom in Singapore. (APO means apochromatic – corrected for all colours to produce fringing-free, sharper images).

Then it was into the macro and flash system, and boy, Olympus had the best system of any maker then. I found most of this stuff second hand:

I owned all these and more. In fact, I still have a lot of this flash equipment stored away in a box that I haven’t opened in over a decade. And more:

I had all this! I bought most, if not all of it, second hand as there was a lot of it available. I had to get rid of the big flash grip at left because it overheated every time I tried to use it. No matter, I had an equivalent Metz unit and flash. As you may gather, flash was very big back then. It’s not so important now due to the incredible sensitivity of digital sensors. You can shoot at ISO3200 or more now, so you don’t need flash, although it still helps sometimes.

More to come, much more!

My post today is a result of my favourite blogger, Mike Johnston, of The On-line Photographer ( T.O.P. ) suggesting that he is going to compose a list of ten favourite cameras, compiled from reader suggestions.

But it will probably be restricted to digital cameras, since film is too, er, retro?

That set me thinking that I would like to do a kind of biography of all the cameras I’ve owned and used since I started in about 1969. That’s 54 years; this will be a long post!

_______________________________________________

My first camera (apart from borrowing Dad’s Voigtlander twin lens) was the Praktica Nova 1B.

I remember I bought it from a camera shop (remember those?) in William St, Perth. From memory, with Tessar 50mm lens, it cost about $120 I think, a lot of money then. These cameras were made in what was East Germany, Dresden I think.

It sticks in my memory because when I received my first roll of film back from processing (you had to send Kodachrome off to Melbourne for processing, taking about a week!), it was totally blank. Kodak included a note saying very politely, we think the film has not gone through the camera, due to not being attached to the takeup spool. I was extremely disappointed, as you can imagine. I never did that again. I developed the habit of using my left thumb to turn the takeup knob to check for resistance, signifying that there was film on the spool. It served me well.

Being a Zeiss Tessar lens, the quality of the images was very good, although I seem to remember flare was a bit of a problem. I kept it until about 1972, then donated it to the son of one of my cousins.

_______________________________________________________

My second camera was a source of great excitement, because I bought it in Singapore on my first trip overseas, to the UK, with my good friend from high-school days, Geoff Williams.

On the right, my travel notebook from 1974. I can still remember buying this camera, at a shop called Evergreen Electrical on the north side of People’s Park shopping centre, New Bridge Road, Singapore. I think I chose it on the basis of good reviews in Modern Photography magazine. Plus it was shutter priority auto exposure – you set a shutter speed and as long as the meter needle was in the zone, i.e. between f1.4 and f22 approx, then the camera set the aperture on the lens. I was a shutter priority believer. This was called “trap needle” automation in Konica-speak. Would you believe, a metal bar inside the camera lightly clamped down on the meter needle, and depending where on the bar, therefore that set the exposure.

It cost me S$468, and since the ratio of dollars then (1974) was A$1 = S$3.70, that made it A$126.49 – a bargain! I bought it with the Konica Hexanon 50mm f1.7 lens and of course in those days it came with the “never-ready” leather case. Geoff bought a Minolta SRT101 with Rokkor 50mm lens, and I remember having a slightly animated discussion about whether he should spend the extra money to get an f1.4 lens. He did. I thought it was a waste and he should have saved money with the cheaper f1.7.

I also bought a Vivitar 28mm lens, and a day later a Vivitar 135mm lens in Change Alley. Wow, what a great time I had. I loved that camera and kept it until 1980 when I sold it to a work mate. *Story to come.

_______________________________________________________

My next purchase, while I still had the Konica, that is, was a second hand Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex with standard 80mm lens.

This camera was unique for a twin lens, in that you could change lenses. The lenses were mounted on a metal “board” that was clamped to the main body by a wire lever. Crude, but it worked. I also bought a used second lens panel, a 28mm equivalent, although I had a lot of trouble with it, due to the aperture blades sticking. I think a previous owner had tried to lubricate them and used the wrong lubricant.

I owned this for quite a few years and it made a trip to Bali with me, on my first visit in 1980. It was an unwieldy camera to use, having to look down on the viewfinder from the top, on a laterally reversed image. It used 120 size film with 12 shots per roll. There was no snapshooting – each image had to be composed with the camera held at waist level. But the quality of the images was superb. I had a few stored away but they seem to have got lost. I donated it to my neice-in-law, who has repaid me by cutting me off, not speaking to me for more than 11 years.

________________________________________________

In about 1982 one of my workmates asked if he could buy the Konica setup from me. Sure, I said, as I was always looking to change cameras in those days.*

My choice for my next camera was one of my favourites of all my “career”, the Pentax Super A with 50mm lens as shown.

I think this was a great design. It gave Program exposure, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and Manual exposure, simply by setting the lens aperture ring to A, or the shutter knob to A as desired, or leaving them independent for Manual. There was a small LCD window on the top plate to show shutter speed.

One small problem was the perspex window in the front of the pentaprism (shown above). This gave light into the viewfinder display, but when blocked off, the viewfinder went dark. This was never a problem for me because I didn’t wear hats, but when I sold it later to a mate, he complained bitterly because he wore baseball caps where the visor covered this window. He implied that the camera was faulty and that I hadn’t told him about this. Hmm.

Anyway, I never invested in Pentax lenses except for a couple of Tamron Adaptall 2 (changeable mount) lenses. I liked this camera because it had a very nice feel to it and I could adjust things by touch, without looking. This was my introduction to the Pentax family and I became a Pentaxian. I still am! I still have a comprehensive digital Pentax system (the K-5) and five or six lenses.

One drawback to it was the self timer switch (with the small arrowhead below the Super A logo in the top picture). This fell under my middle finger when holding the camera, and I grew frustrated at the number of times I pressed the shutter release, only for nothing to happen and to have the self timer start counting down because I’d accidentally moved this switch to on.

I sold it around 1986(?) because the Olympus Spot/Program became available at a very attractive price and I badly wanted to get into the Olympus system for their flash gear. So the Pentax was sold to my baseball-cap wearing friend. Who never read the manual that came with it and constantly whinged to me that it was “no good”, because he didn’t know how to use it. In the end he dropped it and it never worked properly again.

• In about 1984, my workmate asked me at work if I had the serial numbers of the camera, because he’d been burgled and the camera and lens was stolen. “Sure”, I said, and on the spot I said, “The camera body is 586755 and the lens is 7627303.” Seriously. I had memorised them when I went to the UK in 1974 and once in my brain, they stay there. I’ve just recalled them right now to write this. He was a bit gobsmacked. But it did no good, the camera was never recovered.

________________________________________________________

To be continued! MUCH more to come.

This post was written last week, when it was incredibly hot. It was too hot to continue writing so I delayed it.

_______________________________________________________

Pheeee-ew! It is hot! It’s 43ºC today, after 39º yesterday. And tomorrow it is forecast to be 42º, and 41º on Saturday, and another forty degree-er on Sunday, and another on Monday. We’ve already exceeded the record for the number of forty degree days this summer. And we’ve had above 30deg temps for more than ten days in a row, I think.

Luckily, as I’ve said before, this house is well insulated and with ducted air con, I’m hardly noticing the heat. I don’t need to turn it on until around midday, and it goes off at about 5pm because it gets too cold in my TV watching position. I don’t need it on overnight, either.

So with solar power, and the $400 grant from the state government, I don’t need to worry about the cost of running the air con either. Not much, anyway. This is all good.

_____________________________________________________

I’ve delayed continuing this post for a few days and wowee! The heat goes on. This is the hottest February I have ever known in my 77 years. We had three days of 43degC in one burst last weekend and we’ve had about eight days over 40deg in the 20 days of the month so far. It’s a cool change today, only 37deg! And there’s more to come – the highs will continue on Thurs, Friday and the weekend.

The question is, is this global heating? Is this climate change? If, by some miracle, we reversed the increase in CO₂ in the atmosphere, would the temperatures go back to the mid to high thirties?

I think the answer is, probably yes, but it would take up to a century for any change to take effect, because that’s how long the increase in CO₂ and hence the heating has been going on.

So the answer is, better get used to it. I absolutely do not think we will stop the increase in atmospheric CO₂ (erroneously called “carbon” – carbon is black soot, CO₂ is a gas!)

My house is very well insulated (sheets of fibre in the roof space) and I have ducted airconditioning. I haven’t even turned it on yet today, at 10am.

My cars are airconditioned, and the premises I visit are also airconditioned, so I’m not exposed to the heat much.

__________________________________________________________

The announcement of all those new Navy vessels today is great, but for cryin’ out loud, where are we going to get all the highly skilled construction workers to build the ships, and all the thousands of new crew members to operate them? Isn’t it clear, skills and experience are becoming so much in demand. But the company I worked for all my working life placed a low value on training.

I worked with a guy, 10 years younger than me but extremely bright, a software programmer who had the ability to easily pick up new software languages.

He wanted to do a degree at Curtin University and all he wanted from the company was to be able to arrange his shifts so that he could attend lectures at the uni during the day, that is, in work hours. He wasn’t asking for time off, just to be able to arrange his shifts to give him time to attend lectures.

The company’s answer was no, we need you here, sorry. It was unbelievable and has not been forgotten.

______________________________________________________

_{Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Ozemandias. Shelley. I don’t think I could live in that building. I’d be too afraid it would topple.}

Aaah, I feel better today. I was able to get quite a few hours of continuous sleep last night and awoke reasonably refreshed. And I’m pretty sure I know why I slept properly – no alcohol after about 7pm. Especially no mixed drinks, i.e. beer plus red wine. That’s a pity. Maybe I’ll try white wine to see if it has the same detrimental effect. Or prosecco – I do like that. Poor man’s champagne.

________________________________________________

Strange, I’m still using Ozempic (semaglutide) the “fullness”” drug, and although I was having excellent success last year, losing 6kg, since Xmas it doesn’t seem to be working. That is, I still feel hungry. And paradoxically, I even feel food cravings. My weight has risen by a couple of kilos and is not going down. Bugger.

I guess the answer is that you have to use a bit of will power (or ‘won’t’ power) as well as the drug. That’s not easy, whereas the weight loss before Xmas seemed effortless. Oh well, shoulder to the wheel.

________________________________________________

My partner bought me a book for my upcoming birthday (bless her) called Interstellar Travel. She heard me thinking aloud about it, something I’ve been thinking about for years. I have ideas about it:

• I believe we’re kind of quarantined in the Universe, by some kind of natural design. A bit like a beetle placed in a deep bowl. No matter how much it tries, it can’t climb the walls of its container. There’s a whole world outside, as we know, but the beetle will never be able to see it or visit it.

• I think there’s a reason behind this: it’s so that each civilisation in the Universe (and I belive there are many, many, in fact countless civilisations), can’t “contaminate” other cultures. We are not meant to visit other civilisations. We are in a gravity “bowl” and are never going to be able, like the beetle, to climb out.

• The speed of light is unbreakable, an absolute limit. Nothing, not even light, can travel faster than 3.0 x 10⁸ metres/second. That also means information. Since we can never even approach that speed (our mass increases according to m = F/a (F=ma) then the faster we accelerate (a), the bigger our mass (m) increases and therefore the force (F) required, so as to limit our velocity. The idea of a spaceship approaching or exceeding the speed of light is ridiculous, according to our present knowledge, anyway. It’s possible there may in the future be some breakthrough in the laws of physics, but it’s very doubtful.

• Even if we did decide to travel to our nearest star, and could build a spaceship capable of such a trip, it would take at least 200 – 300 years even if we could travel at a fraction (maybe 10%) of the speed of light. That means the crew and travellers in that ship would have to live and die on the ship, and breed at least one new generation in the ship. Yes, have sex and give birth to a new crew, at least once. Just think of the sociological and psychological implications. The parents would know that they would never see Earth again, nor would their children, but they would need to be educated with all the human social knowledge required to live lives in the service of the Goal, to reach the new star.

• But what if the children and young adults rebelled? What if they didn’t care about the Goal? What about the potential for serious rebellion, even warfare between the true believers and the rebels? The ship would need to be vast, so could there be a form of segregation?
  
• While the spacecraft is on it’s century or more long voyage, research and development on Earth will not stand still and there is every possibilty that when the present day craft finally arrives, there may be a welcoming committee on the new planet to greet them, having arrived decades before. This would be extremely upsetting for the slow voyagers, having thought they would be the first.
  
• Relativistic effects would mean that time would pass much more slowly for the voyagers compared to Earth time, meaning that the people on Earth would age much faster. Therefore the voyagers would have to accept that their parents and loved ones left on Earth would age and die during the voyage. So they would need to accept that they would not see or be able to talk to their families again.
  
• Even communicating with Earth would become almost impossible as the voyage went on. At present, signals from the farthest man-made objects, Voyager 1 and 2, tiny spacecraft launched in the 1970s and presently past Pluto, outside the Soar system, take more than three hours to reach Earth. It would take days, weeks or months for signals from an interstellar spacecraft to reach Earth, meaning the voyagers would be “on their own”, with virtually no news or hope of messages from Earth. This would be an enormous psychological hurdle.
  
• Huge strides have been made in electronic and mechanical reliability in the past few decades, but reliability measured in centuries? It’s not feasible at the moment. At present, electronics will last decades, but no-one can predict what will happen over century time scales.
  
  In other words, I don’t believe we are at the required level of reliability, and won’t be for a long time.
  Huges strides have been made in electronic and mechanical reliability in the past few decades, but reliability measured in centuries? It’s not feasible at the moment. At present, electronics will last decades, but no-one can predict what will happen over century time scales.
  
• So what happens when (not if) components break down and go faulty? How many spares can the spaceship carry? What would happen if spares ran out? Who would do the diagnosis and repairs? Would the training facilities on the spaceship be able to train the next generation of technicians, and the next? Would there be a new generation willing to take on the training and responsibilities? Probably yes, but probably is not enough, we would need certainty.
  
  In other words, I don’t believe we’re at the required level of reliability, and won’t be for a long time.
  
• What about food? Providing for a crew of probably at least 100 people for up to two centuries will require innovative ideas. Obviously, crops requiring large areas of soil will be difficult. It will be possible to use vast areas of hydroponic crops – we already know how to do this. Animals? Unlikely. The requirements for grazing areas, waste disposal, slaughtering areas, animal husbandry would likely be too onerous. Better to use artificial growth for meat, as we can do already. However, this is another area where reliability will be critical.
  
  It’s one thing to manufacture the required food on board the ship, but variety and innovation will be critical. Imagine needing to eat the same diet, even if rotating on a weekly basis, for 100 years.
  
  I could go on, but the last point I want to raise is motivation. The first crew and passengers will know that theirs is a one way trip and they will never see the destination. They will die on board, hopefully of natural causes.
  
  But this would be a daunting prospect. It would require a high degree of altruism to know that you are sacrificing your life and that of your family without ever seeing the fruits of your sacrifice.
  So a new generation would need to be born on the ship and be taught the objective of the voyage. Popular fiction always shows the crew being in a state of suspended animation, frozen in a deep sleep, but the fact is that we don’t know how to do this. Maybe it will become routine in 50 years or so, but there’s no guarantee of this. And reliability must be factored in again. The cryogenics would need to be 100% reliable. We can never guarantee this.

So I reiterate, I can’t see this human race venturing out of the Solar System to other planets around distant stars in our lifetimes. I’m always open to the thought that some astounding breakthroughs will be made in the next 50 – 100 years which will negate my objections, but I’d be very surprised.

_________________________________________

The other day I found a query on the web: if we set out to travel in a straight line into interstellar space, would we go on forever, or loop around and return to our starting point (even if it took a very, very long time)? This was what a very knowledgable person wrote in answer:

Despite all the possibilities that account for the shape, curvature, and topology of the Universe, traveling in a straight line, even forever, can never return you to your starting point. The combined facts that:

• the Universe is expanding,
• dark energy is causing the expansion to accelerate,
• it’s already 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang,
• and the Universe does not repeat and is not finite on scales smaller than ~46 billion light-years,

ensure that we’ll never be able to circumnavigate the Universe the way we can circumnavigate the Earth. The Universe may, on some very grand cosmic scale, truly be finite in nature. But even if it is, we’ll never be able to know. While we can travel through space as far as we like, as fast as we can, for as long as we can imagine without end, most of what’s in the Universe is already forever beyond our reach. There is a cosmic horizon that limits how far we can travel through the expanding Universe, and for objects more than ~18 billion light-years away at present, they’re already effectively gone.

So there you go. Or there you went. Whatever.

_______________________________________________

Finally:

What is it? It’s a printed circuit board made by Tektronix, a USA company that makes ultra high end electronic test equipment. I used to use a lot of their gear in my days at Channel 7.

I believe this is the base PCB for a large test array. You can see the sockets for extra assemblies in the corners. I think it looks fantastic. This is 1960s technology, by the way, long outdated and obsolete.

Aaarrrgh, I can’t sleep. I don’t remember dropping off at all last night and I was feeling so tired this morning that I had to cancel two appointments. The first was for the nurse at the medical centre who was going to change the dressing on me “botty”. I’ve got a boil, y’see. On me botty. It was incredibly painful at the start and was bleeding quite badly. It’s had three changes of dressing so far and two courses of an antibiotic. It’s much better, but not completely cleared yet.

The other appointment was at Joondalup Hospital, the Day Care Unit, for an aged person’s guide to physio, to coin a phrase. I couldn’t have coped with it today.

So after a very light breakfast, I went back to bed and tried to get some more sleep. But as usual, I could only manage an hour. That’s all I can ever manage. Not good. I’m building a very large sleep deficit.

That hour, plus another hour of resting made me feel much better, anyway. * see below

___________________________________________________________

I think I mentioned that I have a new phone, or if I didn’t mention it, I have. I had to buy it because of the shut down of the 3G network. Although my previous phone was a 4G model, it didn’t have the voLTE protocol. It meant I could send and receive SMS messages, but no voice calls in or out.

The previous phone was a OnePlus 3T and I’d had it since 2017. Not a bad run, and if it hadn’t been for this voLTE bizzo, I would have kept it forever. It was good.

So I chose another OnePlus, Nord something, with, not only 4G, but 5G as well. In theory I can use it as an internet hotspot at speeds of 3Gb/s or something like that. But at a big data cost.

However! I hate it! The software is bloody awful. It’s Android, of course, but it will not leave me alone, constantly trying to force me to install bloody Tik Tok and other stupid applications that I don’t want. Plus trying to force advertisements on me, so badly, so infuriatingly that I’ve had to install Ad Blocker. But even that constantly shows an ad!! Bloody hell! It’s bad enough that if I could figure out how to do it, I would return it. If it’s not too late. I bought it through Amazon.

I’ve realised that I think I can upgrade my old phone to give me voLTE. That would put me in a quandary. I think I should do it anyway, even though I only have one SIM card. I could get another one, of course. Hmmm.

This new phone has a twin lens camera, and the main sensor is 104Mpixels! That makes file sizes of around 38,000 x 28,000 pixels or 100MByte files. That’s far bigger than any of my stills cameras.

Of course, it assumes I have the energy and strength to go out photographing.

__________________________________________________________

I’m watching Foyle’s War on TV. What an absolutely superb program this is. The star is Michael Kitchen. I’ve never seen him in any other production, yet he’s magnificent in this role. There are quite a few episodes in this series. I’ve seen most of them before but I don’t remember tonight’s. Highly, highly recommended.

_________________________________________________________

Speaking of TV, I’m almost embarrassed to say that I’m addicted to two other programs on Seven, Million Dollar Sales New York (and the same program set in LA), and Shark Tank which follows it.

The first is all about real estate sales in New York (and LA) and holy smoke, there’s nothing under $2m, going up above $15 million for apartments and town houses. One NY town house this week was four stories and had an indoor salt water pool. Virtually all the properties have pools and the locations with views are all important, naturally.

Nearly all are already furnished and if not, the agent has to arrange to have furniture brought in for the prospective clients, a process called staging.

Today’s program in LA showed a mansion, there’s no other word for it, at $60 million! And the client didn’t bat an eyelid at the price. She didn’t choose that one, but another one at $16.5 million with a decision almost on the spot after a five minute phone conversation with her husband in London.

The other program, Shark Tank, is based on the UK program called Dragons’ Den, where people with inventions or ideas for enterprises pitch their product to people with money seeking investments. The inventors make a short five minute presentation asking for money at a certain percentage of their company. Whether their pitch is attractive or not is the interesting part.

What’s also interesting is the difference between the UK production and the USA version. The UK “dragons” are cold, almost malevolent, very unfriendly. I assume it’s by design. And each entrepreneur is required to walk up a steep staircase before reaching the main floor, meaning they’re somewhat out of breath and uncomfortable as they have to face the dragons.

By contrast, the US “Sharks” are good natured, natural, friendly and jokey, putting the entrepreneurs at ease from the start. Except for one “shark” all the others seem like very nice people. The one exception is abrasive, self opinionated, egotistical (he calls himself Mr Wonderful!) and hard to deal with.

Anyway, the show is entertaining and addictive. I enjoy it very much.