Christmas 1959. I was 12 years old, just getting interested in things in life broader than the goings-on in a small town in eastern Canada. For no reason I can now think of ,I suddenly got interested in photography and wanted a good camera, an impossible goal to save for on a school boy's allowance of 50 cents a week.
We were a middle class family but my parents were in an unhappy marriage, not especially affectionate to each other or their children and generally impervious to our needs beyond the basics of food, shelter and schooling. We had a Kodak 616 Brownie which had been purchased for our baby photos and afterwards related to a storage shelf - many years later after my dad had passed, I cleaned out the family home and found it in a cupboard where it had been put and forgotten for several decades - alas, by then riddled with fungus and totally unusable, that and 616 film was no longer sold anyway. So a loss.
Enter a family friend who took pity on me and found a camera - a secondhand Zeiss Nettar 515/16 6x6 rangefinder camera with the oft-maligned Albada finder and a Prontor-S shutter, a much better camera than I was knowledgable enough to or capable of using. It was gifted to me late in the day after the ritual ordeal family lunch along with a leather case, a lens hood, a yellow-green filter, two rolls of Verichrome Pan film. and a Focal Press guide book on using the Nettar.
That Nettar awakened and fostered my lifelong interest in photography. It was capable of surprisingly good results but it took me the best part of a year to work out the Focal book instructions and finally start shooting usable images mostly of school friends, family cats and chocolate-box pictorial scenes, mostly fishing boats and wharves now long vanished from the landscape.
The camera had a pinhole in the bellows which produced an impressively large sun spot on my first rolls of film. The local library had copies of the then-current photo magazines and in one (I vaguely recall it was the British Amateur Photographer, or possibly an old edition of the long-forgotten Minicam) I found a way to plug the hole with a mix of candle wax and Parker's black ink, which worked to a degree even if the wax blob kept dropping off and had to be regularly replaced.
A few years later I got seriously interested in photography (and also journalism) and saved up enough to buy a Yashica D TLR, which ultimately led to a Rolleiflex 3.5E2 and the wherewithal to earn enough income from photography to see me through my college years.
The Nettar vanished in the late 1960s (I suspect my younger brother 'pinched' it to trade on a guitar he badly wanted but didn't have enough cash to buy) but I still have the lens hood, filter and the Focal guide.
Gosh, all that took place a lifetime ago. I'm now 73, some days I think I'm 37 again, other days I feel more like 730 and trying to be 370. A lot of living has taken place over that time.
In 2006 I bought another 515/16. I have too many cameras now and I rarely use it, but I treasure it as a pivotal event-memory from my childhood. As primitive as it now seems in this digi-everything age, when used carefully at f/8 or f/11 the Nettar can still produces amazingly sharp negatives. Eight by tens are as crisp as contact prints or even anything I take with my Rolleiflex Zeiss Planar.
Along with two brass horse bridle bells dated 1878 from my grandfather's barn, the Nettar and its 'bits' are truly cherished possessions.
I left North America in 1975 and have lived in Australia for almost half a century. A 'white' Christmas is now alien to me but the memories are still with me. Cards of snow scenes make me laugh but tomorrow will be 18 degrees with showers and a brisk southerly wind, infinitely preferable to 35 degrees with a boiling sun and UV in the upper stratosphere. After our usual holiday lunch I'll indulge in a long walk in the countryside with my Nikon D800 and yes, the Nettar in my bag with all the original 'bits' and two or three rolls of Rollei 100 Pan or Ilford HP5, whatever I grab from the film fridge when I'm ready to hit the tracks.
I never cease to be amazed as how such small things can have such meaning in my life.
Christmas, 1972 by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr
