Genuine question Rob. Over your career how many different cameras did you actually own? What I'm trying to get at here is what was the average life of a film camera body and how does that compare with what we are seeing presently in the digital world? I have a feeling that now digital is here and established the rapid pace of equipment replacement is slowing, the difference between the two may not be as great as is generally thought and is set to narrow further.
Okay, I'll try to answer briefly, but it's a bit more complicated because of the different finacial possibilities I faced through those years; had I had enough capital from the start, the list would have been very much shorter. Buying on credit I didn't do, other than for the old Rollei because I was just an apprentice engineer at the time I bought it and had no choice. Debt is a small-business killer; big business looks at it a different way. Too big to fail is strength.
Start-up: one second-hand Rolleiflex T and one Exakta Varex lla that I'd bought new some years before.
Next buys: added a Mamiya TLR for it's 180mm which I used for portrait and hairdresser shots.
Bought another Exakta Varex body - the llb.
Sold the Exaktas and bought a new Nikon F.
Made some pennies and sold the Rollei for a new Hassy 500C with 80mm.
Sold the Mamiya with 180mm and bought a 150mm Hassy lens instead when I could.
Bought a new Nikon F2 Photomic when I could.
Bought a Nikon FM for its higher flash synch for those rare times I needed it outdoors.
Sold that when the Nikon FM2 came out with even higher synch speed.
Bought a second new Hassy 500C/M at some period.
Had Nikkors from 24mm up to 200mm plus a 500 Reflex. The 'blad stuff consisted of the 50mm, 80mm and 150mm.
Sold the two 'blads and bought my first 6x7, a Bronica G something. It sucked, especially the 50mm, though the 250m gave me a single nice poster and travel brochure cover. The 100mm (?) was okay(ish). 6x7 was bought to satisfy agency demands for the 6x7 format, but achieved absolutely zero for stock.
Sold the Bronica and expanded the Nikon stable with an F4s body and a 300mm Nikkor optic.
Fell in love with a beautiful new Pentax 67ll and traded away all the Nikon stuff.
By that time, I'd realised it was the male menopause and not common sense that was pulling my strings. I also decided that pro photography and I had run our course together.
Sold the Pentax and bought myself a new Nikon F3... I'd bought the hated, earlier F4s because lack of advertising presence had led me to believe that the F3 had been replaced by the F4, when in reality, it was still current but hidden. (Another of the penalties of living on a pre-Internet desert island was lack of information of the outside world.)
That F3 was used for a few, later, sporadic travel brochure and villa sales assignments, and I grew the lens armoury once more, but for fun, and continue to this day with adding first the D200 (I'd learned my lesson about trading working things away) and then later the D700 body.
If I have any regrets it's mostly about listening to agency 'experts' in relation to their preferences for 6x7 trannies over 6x6, especially when you realise that they used to make 4x5 dupes of everything that they thought worthwhile and might have legs. Of them all, the biggest single regret is parting with two Hasselblad cameras and their glass. It's true: nobody really knows anything in the images worlds, movies
or stills! We all live in hope, illusions and a modicum of greed.
;-)
Rob C
