Bookends

My cupboards are full – well some are, of treasured, old, magnificent, beautifully crafted works of art.

Manual film cameras have always been wonders of mechanical precision, to be revered, used, cosseted and coaxed into producing images to savour . Those of us brought up on the delights of BxW and the even greater delights of learning how different films and developer combinations produced a mildly different look and feel can look back at that time with deep nostalgia and the successful ones with a certain sense of pride.

The old competitors of Canon and Nikon versus the Pentax and the quaint OM users all had the common goal of mixing and matching the film – dev combinations to achieve the result. Ah, what fun. The Tri X gang versus the HP5 lads – or HP3 if you want to take a step further backwards. How about some Verichrome Pan sir? Plus X – that will do fine!

Then there was ID11 or D76 and I dare not go into all the other acutance and – no, dont go down that route John!

Cameras? Thats for another time but my cupboard of AI, AIs, FDs and Zuikos all now live (un)happily together in boxes in cupboards. Unused, still looked at from time to time but still loved for ever!