You And Your Camera - weekly magazine from the '70s

[Archiver]

In 1979, Eaglemoss Publications of London began production of the weekly magazine, You And Your Camera. Aimed at beginner and enthusiast photographers, YAYC was filled with articles about gear, techniques, lighting, subjects and more.

There were many articles about professional photographers and their techniques, with lots of high quality examples of their images. Home developing techniques were covered, not to mention articles about composition, landscape photography, filter choices, glamour and nude photography, and so much more. Many of the concepts and techniques still apply today, and the articles about film development and enlarging would be of use to many film hobbyists.

Then there's the advertisements. Dixons was a regular advertiser in YAYC, with ads for 'a free auto winder with every purchase of a Pentax ME or ME Super', or the latest Chinon kit.

The series ran for 96 issues, and I'm fortunate to have four binders worth of them. They are a wonderful snapshot (pun intended) of photography in the late 70s and early 80s. By the time Dad taught me the basics of photography, he had a large collection of these magazines, and I spent many hours as a young teenager, and ten years later as an adult, reading them and absorbing what I could. I still very much enjoy going through the issues, finding new understandings based on what I now know.

Does anyone else remember this magazine? Hey, I wonder if any of you were featured in it, or knew people who were. 😀

 

[kuvvy]

Remember them pretty well. I collected them all and had them all saved in their binders. As with all ‘partworks’ as they were called they did cost a fortune to build up. The quality however and the information was very good.
If I remember correctly, it was a picture by photographer Homer Sykes that appeared in YAYC of the Brittania Coconut Dancers in the North West of England that first got me interested in street photography.
For those that don’t know and I guess that’s quite a lot of you here, the Bacup Nutters as they are known, are a kind of Morris dancing group who ‘black up their faces, wear a kind of skirt and coconut shells on their knees and dance their way through the local area in celebration every Easter Saturday. Nothing weird about that.

As for the YAYC volumes, I did try to sell them sometime later but ended up donating to a charity shop.

Paul

 

[Archiver]

I think this series is even more relevant to the RFF crowd because it was produced around the time of the gear that we like. So many of us have cameras from Pentax, Minolta, Leica, old Nikon and Canon gear, and older cameras like Rollei 35s, Rolleiflexes, etc. Right now on the front page of RFF is the very active thread about Takumar lenses, which would have been very much in use in the late 70s.


I'm going to go through the photographers who featured in the magazines, and see if the names ring any bells.

 

[Archiver]

Interestingly, I've just discovered that our Roger Hicks may have written for this magazine.

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You and your camera | Amateur Photographer

Hi all Ive only just signed up to the forum so if I'm posting in the wrong area please redirect :) I've come across a load of old camera magazine's...

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I'll look through the magazines and see if there's anything by him.