Which camera made you fall in love with photography?

Alberti said:
After a photography course I got a Leica M2. A secondary SLR I had the Canon-F1 that my wife loved.
My greatest love went to the M8.2. The colours. The ease. The fantastic pictures. Every shot a great shot. The haptic quality. And over a few years, 600 equivalent-rolls of Kodachrome in my hands.
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I love my Canon F1N. It was fun to use this solid camera. I used viewfinders allowing spotmetering. Nikon did not have any cameras with spotmeters.
 
These days I own several cameras, some very nice. But the camera that really hooked me on photography was my Pentax K1000 SE back in the late 70s. Those were the days, one camera and one 50mm lens and a whole lot of Kodak Gold (or whatever the inexpensive Kodak color film was called.) I would carry an exposed roll or so every week to the hardware store in Tonopah, Nevada and bring back prints and negatives from what I had given them the week before along with more rolls of unexposed film. I still have that K1000 and I still love and use it, but not nearly as often as I did when it was my only camera.
 
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caila77 said:
Which camera made you fall in love with photography?
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Nikkormat FT2. I'd had the use of various family cameras until then but that was the first I bought with my own money.
Thousands of frames of mostly Ektachrome, covering a lot of motorsport events for a couple of years, honed my skillset with it. Learned the hard and painful way how to not waste film and money.
When I later bought an OM-1, the shutter control just seemed so natural. In fact, I still have my second OM-1, which I'll never part with.
 
Being able to capture a memory. Something that transports you back to that moment in an instant.

It started with digital, then when wanting to be more creative led me to vintage lenses and then I realised I loved how they looked instantly nostalgic.

Then it made sense to use the film bodies that came with some lenses eventually making me realise to have a physical media that will last 100+ years vs digital media that could fail or become obsolete just made alot of sense.
 
I was a kid of a camera nut dad and my mom also had an interest in photography too, but not necessarily to the same extent as my dad. So, I grew up with lots of cameras around, and my parents always indulged us kids by handing us smaller cameras and telling us how to use them to take a picture or two of our own. Still, my mom's Instamatic X-35 or my dad's Speed Graphic didn't spark the passion in me. Oddly, my grandparents had some old cameras in the closet in a back bedroom that they used as a guest bedroom, and for some reason I really loved the look and feel of the Kodak Brownie Hawkeye made out of black Bakelite. As a 4-year-old, it was fun to pretend to take pictures with that camera for some reason.

The camera that did it for me was a Pentax Auto 110 that I saw at the camera shop in our local mall. My mom must have seen me fondling it as a bored teenager because she gave it to me as a gift the next Christmas. It was the beginner kit with the 24mm lens and small flash, plus a little vinyl bag to hold the camera and flash. I took it to college with me, then off to the Navy after college. It fit very nicely in the pocket of my flight suit. Over the years I've added most of the lenses and I replaced the little flash after it failed with the bigger flash. I still have the thing 45 years later, and I even pull it out and shoot the occasional roll just for fun.

Now, decades later, I have perhaps a hundred cameras, most of them being 35mm, but 15 or so are 110 cameras.

Scott
 
I'd like to say that Dad's Pentax ME or Minolta SR-T 101 hooked me on photography, and while he taught me the basics of focusing and handling with those cameras, it didn't really click (pun intended) for me until later. Nor was it the Kodak Disc camera I used for a little while when I was 13, nor Dad's camera magazines that he bought in the early 80s.

No, it was the Canon S45 digital compact that changed my life in 2002. And I do not say that with any sense of hyperbole - the ability to shoot unlimited decent quality images that could be instantly viewed on a computer was a true life changing experience. Suddenly, I was able to capture memories on the spot, with no thought of processing costs or time. It came with me everywhere, and I'd go out on purposeful photo walks, around the suburbs and into the City on what seemed like exciting and surreal adventures.

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Years later, I'm able to look back on those images to see shops and buildings that no longer exist, times out with family and friends, rural Victoria and overseas trips. This could have been done with film, but not with the same carefree profligacy that digital allows. The S45 allowed me to document my life in ways I'd never thought possible, and sent me on an odyssey which has lead to a rewarding life filled with photography.
 
Archiver said:
I'd like to say that Dad's Pentax ME or Minolta SR-T 101 hooked me on photography, and while he taught me the basics of focusing and handling with those cameras, it didn't really click (pun intended) for me until later. Nor was it the Kodak Disc camera I used for a little while when I was 13, nor Dad's camera magazines that he bought in the early 80s.

No, it was the Canon S45 digital compact that changed my life in 2002. And I do not say that with any sense of hyperbole - the ability to shoot unlimited decent quality images that could be instantly viewed on a computer was a true life changing experience. Suddenly, I was able to capture memories on the spot, with no thought of processing costs or time. It came with me everywhere, and I'd go out on purposeful photo walks, around the suburbs and into the City on what seemed like exciting and surreal adventures.

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Years later, I'm able to look back on those images to see shops and buildings that no longer exist, times out with family and friends, rural Victoria and overseas trips. This could have been done with film, but not with the same carefree profligacy that digital allows. The S45 allowed me to document my life in ways I'd never thought possible, and sent me on an odyssey which has lead to a rewarding life filled with photography.
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Amusingly, and back to my origins, I had an S45 that I used on a field microscope in the very early 2000s. Things have a habit of returning, often after an unpredictable absence.
 
This one (from 1956), in the early 80s. I have always kept it and still use it (after a CLA last year) and enjoy it.

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Back then, it came with a Zeiss Jena Tessar 1:2,8 / 50 and the prism finder.
My father had bought it in 1959 or 1960. In 1960 he took a lot of Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides with it during his first journey to Spain.
 
I don’t think that any particular camera gave me a life-long interest in photography; rather it was learning how to process and print film that really gave me a desire to spend more time making photographs. The more time I spent making photographs the more I was consumed with questions about the possibilities of a photograph: how does a photograph “work” as an object that intends to communicate with an audience, and lots of similar questions. I am still asking those questions. I am still making photographs, and I am still surprised at what these photographs teach me about seeing.
 
My first “real camera” was a Nikon FE-2 after having been given an old Praktica with a 135/3.5 lens only and a broken Carl Zeiss Pancolar 50/1.8.. I cut my teeth on the 135 lens but soon decided I needed something more capable and bought the FE-2 and Nikkor 55/2.8 Micro as I found I really liked close-up photography. In the next few yrs I added to my lens kit with some Nikkor single focal length lenses as well as a couple tele zooms.

This became my tools of choice until I found a cherry Leica III F Red Dial, and my photography world changed to much older collectible cameras. I will have to say I have enjoyed my many RF and collectble SLR’s, but my best photography was always the FE-2 and the Nikkors I used….which by the way, I still have them all.
 
When I was 12, my father bought a Asahi Pentax Spotmatic SP with SMC Takumar 1.8/55. He was always in trouble to operate it, so he bought the Asahi Pentax Book. I owned a very poor and simple Agfamatic 126 only, and managed to overtalk my father to take the family and holiday snapshots with the Spotmatic after reading nearly the entire book which fascinated me a lot.

Shooting with the Spotmatic was easy and a joy for me. Very quickly I got good results, even on slide film. When I was 17, my father died. The Spotmatic was for me, and I joined a photo group at my school. Bought some Carl Zeiss Jena wide and telephoto lenses in addition to the standard SMC Takumar. My own darkroom followed, and a passion in shooting portraits. The Spotmatic was my perfect beginners camera due to the fact it is a full mechanical camera and I had to understand what I was doing.
 
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