Blog post #1

Welcome to the new blog of p4pictures, i'm starting out with this blogging thing after reading and subscribing to far too many other photo related blogs.

How to start?
I've been interested in photography since I was as a kid and started with a 110 format film camera, progressing through to an old Agfa Silette with 35mm film and then on to the Practika MTL-3 that so many of my generation of photographers used. The switch to interchangeable lenses, albeit with an M42 threaded mount, opened up all kinds of new options including wider angles and longer lenses. I can't recall any of the lenses I owned for that camera except a 28mm that one day stopped working - the aperture stuck. I disassembled it to find that it would no longer reassemble. Lesson 1 of photography, most of the bits are highly complicated.

With 35mm films, mostly slides, starting to be shot and college beckoning a change to a full featured Yashica FX103 Program called with it's TTL off the film flash metering. I used this for most of college, shooting a variety of films from Ilford HP5, FP4 plus lots of cheap stuff from supermarkets. However in the mid 80s then Canon launched the EOS line of cameras. I can still visualise the in-store displays for the Electro Optical System, great big rotating bits of cardboard with the EOS logo. Somehow I ended up with my first EOS and EOS 650 with the 35-70mm zoom lens. Motordrive, autofocus, automatic rewind - it had everything.

Maybe not everything...
The EOS 650 was updated and turned in to an EOS 600 for faster shooting, better AF, I was hooked and needed one. Somehow I found the money and it was mine, helped a bit by some peer pressure as one of my friends had a 600, and it was so much better than the 650 I had. The EOS 600 lasted for many years and had a lot of film put through it. I'd found motorsport and studio glamour photography - plus a job in engineering to pay for it all.

So it was destined that when the EOS 5 was launched that it would be mine, eye controlled autofocus, faster, bigger, stronger you know the drill... with the days being before internet as a mainstream it was a tour through the photography magazines to find a best price. Eventually based on a search of dealers close to a junction of the M6 motorway I ended up in St Helens to buy the EOS 5 and vertical grip. This camera was the start of my increased expenditure on EOS and also on film. A regular trip to a dealer in Bolton for films and batteries was then the order of the day. I kept the EOS 5 until almost 2002, but since 1995 it had only had limited use. I found digital early.... and expensive!

Time to dig out a slide/neg scanner and relive some of those old images that I carefully archived, now in the loft.

Currently I'm using EOS digital SLR cameras and a growing selection of EF lenses.

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