The Beginning Page 1

Since as long as I can remember I have had a great interest in Photography, and I think it runs in the family, as my Grandmother Beatie McCormack was a keen photographer herself, using the Kodak Brownie model No2 from 1919. You can read a little about Granny's Kodak Box Brownie here.

Provided here are some details with images of the cameras and lenses I have owned during the past 40 years of my life.

The Beginning - A long time long ago in a place far away...........
I always spent my school holidays working for some pocket money, and in 1966 as a 13 year old I worked with my favorite Uncle & my cousin Ron, assisting in crop spraying, working down at the Hilltown railway siding with the bagged wheat stacks, and doing some general farming work in the mid north of South Australia.
I cleaned out pig stys, drove tractors you name I did it.

After a few weeks work I had enough money to purchase my first camera. A Kodak Instamatic 104 Cartridge Film Camera was chosen and purchased during a trip to Clare from Eudunda Farmers store located in the main street.
Kodak was the camera market leader way back then.

Kodak 104 Instamatic
Kodak's answer in the sixties to the simple Brownie box camera and designed for their new Kodapak cartridge film. This consisted of a roll of 35 mm film wound with a numbered backing paper in a precision moulded plastic cartridge, dropped simply into the Instamatic camera.

In 1966 the Instamatic 104, 204 and 304 models were marketed for the newly-introduced flash cubes.

The Kodak Instamatic range would go on to be the most successful in the history of the camera as more than 70,000,000 have been sold. I took all of my extended family's early history photos with this little camera as well as some interesting Lucern crop photos at Hilltown in the mid north of South Australia in full colour.

Kodak 355x Instamatic
By some time in the early '70s I was now using the Kodak 355x and this camera would serve me well on my working holiday to Alice Springs and Broken Hill.
I left Adelaide in 1976 spending a year in Alice Springs, then around a year in Broken Hill in New South Wales and did not return to Adelaide until 1979. Eventually this camera developed a fault and would flatten the battery if it was left in it very quickly.

Kodak EK100 1978
The Kodak EK100 instant print camera was now my favourite photography weapon.
I liked the instant printing feature although the quality and life of the prints was not that good.

c1977-86. Made in USA. A Manual Focus control. Flipflash socket for a strip of flash bulbs.

Millions were sold and eventually in 1986 withdrawn from the market after a successful court ruling in Polaroid's favour. Over 16.5 million were sold.

Canon Sure Shot Auto Focus
This is my first 35 mm camera and I think most of my family finished up buying one of these, even my cousin and his mum.

This was the world's first Lens-Shutter 35mm autofocus camera at the time. It used a triangulation system with a near-infrared emitting diode (IRED).

The active AF system had the IRED emit a near-infrared beam so its reflection was received by a pin photo diode.

When the shutter button is pressed halfway, the IRED emits a near-infrared beam on the subject. The beam reflected by the subject was received by the pin photo diode. A triangulation was thereby created in the same way as with an optical coincidence rangefinder. The lens draw is adjusted automatically to match the subject distance for focusing. The near-infrared beam also enabled focusing under low-light conditions, making the camera a hit product.

I used this for some time until I left photography alone for a few years during the late 80's, my family was growing in numbers, and I built two homes during this time, and started out in my own mechanical repair business.

Some time either 1992 or early 93 I purchased a Pentax MZ 50 complete with a selection of lenses and a dedicated flash unit and a good camera bag. I used this on many trips around South Australia including the Curdimurka Ball in outback SA.

Around this time I also decided it would be good to run two cameras and I went over to a second hand manual Pentax K1000 and I enjoyed the flexibility of having cameras with different lenses and film options for a while.

Each year I would go into the Adelaide Grand Prix and use my 500 mm mirror lens to get some good shots of the F1 cars at high speed on the Stag corner. The MZ 50 was stolen from my home never to be seen again during a burglary in February 1998.

The Canon EOS Era Begins
After the Pentax was stolen I shopped around the main camera stores in Adelaide looking for a second hand SLR, and finally settled on a Canon EOS100 and I found a good second hand Canon EF 80-200 mm 2.8L

Later on in 1998 I found a second hand Canon L 28 -80mm 2.8 - 4L to be my everyday lens.

Later on I traded the EOS 100 on a second hand mint Canon EOS55 QD SLR complete with eye controlled focusing system.

Shopping around I found a good second hand Tokina 17mm wide angle manual focus lens, then I found a 200-400mm Tamron zoom to round out the camera kit.



I also bought the Canon dedicated flash 550 EX E -TTL.

In 1999 I purchased a mint second hand Canon EOS 3 from Diamonds Camera & Video in Rundle Street in Adelaide.

This was truly a fantastic camera and I put many hundreds of rolls of film through it, as I started to photograph the entire city of Adelaide, and I loved the eye controlled focus system, until one day I saw a Nikon F5 in a camera store window and I traded all of my Canon gear to change into the Nikon stable of SLR camera equipment.
Maxwell's Comment: I loved the Canon EOS 3 and I never needed any service from Canon despite the camera suffering some abuse in the field at times.
The build quality was excellent, and the photos produced were sharp & superb. I took many thousands of photos with this camera. It is still a very popular camera today.

Page 2 The beginning of the Nikon Coolpix digital camera era.