lxmike
M2 fan.
Been together. Means a lot if you immigrated not from good reasons. Or just due to c19 these days...
Orthodox Dinning. by Kostya Fedot, on Flickr
I know what you mean, hopefully we can all get some thing close to near normal this year, happy Christmas and stay safe
lxmike
M2 fan.
Ah the good old 110 Auto, was desperate for one, got one eventually but many years later, really cool camera
lxmike
M2 fan.
Christmas 2009 I was playing with Kodachrome 64 film. it was already known that last processor in Texas would soon stop processing the film, so went and bought couple rolls just to have the experience. (edit: not Texas but Kansas, where Dwayne's Photo is
I was using F100 with a good meter, and fast 50 lens, but mid winter nordic light (and perhaps cold weather) resulted lot of under exposed shots. Here's couple somewhat usable:
Despite usng chrome for years I always expected patchy results but still endured with it, your images are how I see winter, as I type this its snowing outside, happy christmas and thanks for sharing your memories and images
Kent
Finally at home...
2006. The first Christmas with our daughter.
And topped by 2007. The first Christmas with our daughter and son.
And topped by 2007. The first Christmas with our daughter and son.
DownUnder
Nikon Nomad
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 Amateur Photographer, or possibly an ancient 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. I've 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 smile but tomorrow will be 18 degrees with showers and a brisk southerly wind, infinitely preferable to 40 degrees with a broiling sun and UV in the upper stratosphere. After our usual lavish buffet slow food 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.
A PS, sort of. Written from my kitchen table on Christmas Day morning. Golly, gosh, yes, I wrote a small book again. I hope some will read it to the end and enjoy it. To compound my literary (or should that be literate?) sins I also forgot to wish one and all on this site a joyful Christmas, happy holidays, joyeux noel as well as to you all, the fervent hope that 2021 will be everything that 2020 has failed to be.
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 Amateur Photographer, or possibly an ancient 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. I've 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 smile but tomorrow will be 18 degrees with showers and a brisk southerly wind, infinitely preferable to 40 degrees with a broiling sun and UV in the upper stratosphere. After our usual lavish buffet slow food 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.
A PS, sort of. Written from my kitchen table on Christmas Day morning. Golly, gosh, yes, I wrote a small book again. I hope some will read it to the end and enjoy it. To compound my literary (or should that be literate?) sins I also forgot to wish one and all on this site a joyful Christmas, happy holidays, joyeux noel as well as to you all, the fervent hope that 2021 will be everything that 2020 has failed to be.
Ko.Fe.
Lenses 35/21 Gears 46/20
Thank you! Happy Holidays!
Formally, our Christmas is on January 7th. Now part of us who are Ukrainian Catholics are celebrating it now and rest of family are Russian Orthodox, still on January 7th.
So, we are keeping lights on until January 14th (old Russian New Year).
Dogman
Veteran
Must have been around 1958/59. My parents gave me my first camera--a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye outfit with flash attachment. I no longer have the camera, just the happy memory.
lxmike
M2 fan.
lxmike
M2 fan.
Thanks for sharing, its snowing here as I type, its funny how small acts are like acorns from which big trees grow, a friend of the family lived around the corner from my family home and he used to share his knowledge with me, he had an extensive Pentax Spotmatic collection.
lxmike
M2 fan.
Thank you! Happy Holidays!
Formally, our Christmas is on January 7th. Now part of us who are Ukrainian Catholics are celebrating it now and rest of family are Russian Orthodox, still on January 7th.
So, we are keeping lights on until January 14th (old Russian New Year).
have a very happy Christmas
lxmike
M2 fan.
narsuitus
Well-known
In hindsight, my most memorable Christmas memory was in December 2017.
I was shooting images to be used for Christmas cards when one of my Fuji X-Pro1 bodies broke. When it powered up, it would take a few shots and then it shut down. When I turned it on again, it would sometimes give a message that instructed me to turn the camera off and try turning it on again.
When I returned home, I noticed that the upper right-hand corner of my images were blurry. I checked the sensor and discovered a large, diffuse, white defect in the upper right quadrant of the sensor.
I later concluded that I must have damaged my sensor while shooting a solar eclipse earlier in the year. Rather than repairing the camera, I decided to replace it with a Leica M10.
Blurry upper right-hand corner by Narsuitus, on Flickr
Sensor Defect by Narsuitus, on Flickr
I was shooting images to be used for Christmas cards when one of my Fuji X-Pro1 bodies broke. When it powered up, it would take a few shots and then it shut down. When I turned it on again, it would sometimes give a message that instructed me to turn the camera off and try turning it on again.
When I returned home, I noticed that the upper right-hand corner of my images were blurry. I checked the sensor and discovered a large, diffuse, white defect in the upper right quadrant of the sensor.
I later concluded that I must have damaged my sensor while shooting a solar eclipse earlier in the year. Rather than repairing the camera, I decided to replace it with a Leica M10.
Blurry upper right-hand corner by Narsuitus, on Flickr
Sensor Defect by Narsuitus, on Flickr
markjwyatt
Well-known
I grew up in a family where photography was just normal (my dad taught a high school photography course), so I do not have many special photo related Christmas memories. My best memory is in 2018. My wife kept asking me what I want, and finally broke down and asked for a Voigtlander SC Skopar 21mm f4 (S-mount, to use on my Contax iia). I ended up getting it from Camera Quest.
robert blu
quiet photographer
Being my father a passionate amateur photographer photography has always been aroud in our family life, and of course even more on special occasion.
And when the Polaroid Swinger arrived it became the official camera...
It's me ...still with hairs
and here Mom and Dad, I guess I took the photo!
Captions always written by Mom, thanks Mom!
And when the Polaroid Swinger arrived it became the official camera...
It's me ...still with hairs
and here Mom and Dad, I guess I took the photo!
Captions always written by Mom, thanks Mom!
lxmike
M2 fan.
In hindsight, my most memorable Christmas memory was in December 2017.
I was shooting images to be used for Christmas cards when one of my Fuji X-Pro1 bodies broke. When it powered up, it would take a few shots and then it shut down. When I turned it on again, it would sometimes give a message that instructed me to turn the camera off and try turning it on again.
When I returned home, I noticed that the upper right-hand corner of my images were blurry. I checked the sensor and discovered a large, diffuse, white defect in the upper right quadrant of the sensor.
I later concluded that I must have damaged my sensor while shooting a solar eclipse earlier in the year. Rather than repairing the camera, I decided to replace it with a Leica M10.
Blurry upper right-hand corner by Narsuitus, on Flickr
Sensor Defect by Narsuitus, on Flickr
both very nice cameras, I have an x-pro 1 myself but also an M2
lxmike
M2 fan.
lxmike
M2 fan.
Being my father a passionate amateur photographer photography has always been aroud in our family life, and of course even more on special occasion.
And when the Polaroid Swinger arrived it became the official camera...
It's me ...still with hairs
and here Mom and Dad, I guess I took the photo!
Captions always written by Mom, thanks Mom!
great photos, l love how photos bring back memories, bring back life
Christmas, 1972 by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr1972- my older Sister and my Nephew. Hard to believe he was 50 this year.
I just did a CLA on the Minolta Hi-Matic 9 this year, used the "Easy-Flash" for this shot. I was 15, bought the camera when I was 11. Digitized the slide 20 years ago.
Timmyjoe
Veteran
Christmas 1968. My Dad had gotten my Mom a Polaroid Automatic 250 Land Camera and it had a little gizmo that you could use to delay the tripping of the shutter, so for the first time we could all be in the picture. It would be my Dad's last Christmas, I remember watching the Apollo 8 coverage with him on TV.
Best,
-Tim
Best,
-Tim
DownUnder
Nikon Nomad
Also I hope, your negatives from that long-ago time. Mine were at the back of my archive filing cabinet for many decades until recently rediscovered during a Covid lockdown clean-up. I
n January most of those old snaps including all my 'selfies' from 1960 to 1975, will be printed by me for the second time (the original prints were made after I processed the films, in those days I had time and energy to spare! but almost all my paper prints have now long disappeared) with the last of my Ilford Galerie FB paper, bought in 2000 and lovingly stored for 'special' images.
Long may all our blissful youthful memories last...