Personal Item 1 - Cameras

First in a series of 100 (I just know I'm going to regret this...) of personal items.

The BBC series A History of the World is told through artifacts. Yesterday I told how the TV programme had given me the idea to tell a more personal history of personally owned items, things from places I had visited and things I have yet to see or missed because they no longer exist. I'll try to make them relevant to a wider world.

No.001 of the personal items is the camera.

The very first camera I owned was a VP Twin, bought by my Mum and Dad at an early age. In fact a bit of research says I must have been 5 at the most because Woolworths stopped selling them in 1959.

It took a roll of paper-backed film of the size 127 and took half the normal size of photograph so you got 16 photos to a roll instead of the 8 that you got with most 127 cameras.

The viewfinder was a simple curved oblong of metal that folded flat to the camera body when not in use. When it was in use - well... it may as well not have been. As a 5-year-old I fondly imagined I was taking a photo of whatever I saw through the oblong regardless of the fact you could look almost in any direction through it, not necessarily where the camera was pointing!

The shutter release was a springed opening that flicked from one side of the lens to the other. Theoretically how fast you flicked it had an effect on the shutter speed and the spring was to even out the speed of the finger. It was a system almost guaranteed to introduce camera shake.

But it introduced me to photography and I still have the odd photo taken on it, such as this one of Mum and Dad (down at the bottom) and the sky over Southport which I think is where it was taken!

A Kodak Instamatic 50 - Kodak's first camera using the much more user-friendly 126 film cartridge - was my second camera. No more tearing off the paper and risking exposing and ruining the entire film as you loaded the camera. These took a plastic cartridge and had a winder that actually stopped you from winding the entire film on after taking the first pic!

I still have the Instamatic 50 somewhere but I took this of a later (though practically the same) Instamatic camera in Bradford's museum of Photography a few years ago. It has a flash cube attached. In my youth taking photos by flash meant using flash bulbs which contained yards of thin magnesium wire that when it went off produced enough heat to melt the glass of the bulb, forming bubbles of molten glass. These cubes were marginally safer in that the melting glass couldn't drip through the plastic cube and you could take four photos and then throw it away.

My first 35mm camera was bought when I was 16. It was a Prinzflex B that I bought from Dixons for £25. Under the plastic Prinzflex badge that Dixons had stuck on, was the name of the manufacturer - Zenit. The photo shows a Zenit E which had a light meter. The Zenit (or as the English had it - Zenith) B had no light meter and the use of a separate meter - about the size of a thick Blackberry - was necessary to get your exposure right. Not many cameras at this point had automatic setting of shutter speed and aperture size.

So that takes you through my introduction to photography - a lifelong hobby and pleasure. But to mankind, photography has provided us with a record of the past that has outlived many of the objects, people and customs that photographs portray. We take so many photographs these days at such little cost that future historians will groan at the available choice.

In the early days of photography the film and print development processes used lots of silver - the cost was high and photographers rarely took more than one shot of anything. Today once we have bought the camera taking photos is free, if we store them as computer images. So judging by Flickr, people take hundreds of similar shots in the hope that luck and randomness will compensate for lack of technique and skill!