How it all began: My first camera / Part 1

Before I go on putting more posts on my blog, I want to set the scene for what is to come. In a way, to look out for the foundations of my approach to the arts.

Since the term “arts” is really broad and also my interaction with various art forms and ways of expression changed over time, I thought I’d start with something simple. Photography.

Looking back into my childhood, there were always photos around as long as I remember. My conscious memories start when I was around five, a year before I went to school. That would have been around 1970.

Back then, the photos I remember mostly were square , often black and white and had a white margin like the picture on top of the post. That particular squareness is also that, when I did some research for this post, I tend to believe that my parents owned a Kodak Instamatic camera. You know, the ones that took film cassettes of the 126 type. And one particular reason why I tend to believe it was a very basic Kodak Instamatic model is that for some odd reason, the one detail I remember about my parent’s camera was the shutter button being rectangular and pretty tiny.

My first photo shoot

I wasn’t very much interested in photography when I was that small, but after I made some friends at school, I remember one strange and funny episode. My friends and I were usually playing in our backyard, where we had a small garage for my grandmother’s car, a shady terrace with a big willow tree and some cherry trees. And yes, there was also a shed.

One day, I had gotten hold of my parent’s camera and a friend and I were playing on our terrace under the willow. At one point, we thought it may be funny to take some photos and it turned into my first conscious photo shoot as we took turns staging ourselves as victims or playing dead, lying on the ground. I had found a knife in my granny’s garage, and we stuck it in a piece of wood so that it looked as if we were stabbed. Too bad I don’t have these photos anymore.

Well, I also do remember that my mother didn’t like the photos we took at all when she had the film developed. I must have been around 9 or 10 back then.

My first own camera

Some years later, I fell in love with a camera. Looking back, it may have been the first instance of me being baited by the industry’s advertising. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any German-speaking ad from those days, but only a French one. And for the rest of this post I will talk a bit about this camera, which turned out to become my first own photo camera and which I kept for pure nostalgia.

It was an Agfamatic 2008 pocket camera, using film cassettes of the 110 type. Looking at the camera today, about 50 years after someone (I don’t remember who) bought it for me, it is still a very nicely designed camera with a mid-1970s charme. During my research for this post, I came across an interview with the son of one of the original designers that gives you some ideas what made this camera such a success when it entered the market in 1975.

I loved this camera, because it was super easy to use and small enough to be carried anywhere. It was also robust (not that I ever tested this, I have always been very careful with my technical equipment, with the notable exception of my bikes, of which I destroyed more than one when I was a kid). And the sounds this camera made are almost iconic… listen for yourself!

But although I have owned and used it until the mid-1980s, I’ve never taken a lot of photos with it. The reason was very simple. Taking photos back then was quite an expensive hobby. Also, it was not as easy as it became later on to have photos developed. In a small town, you either had to bring your photos to a small but expensive shop or, later, to the supermarket, where the photos were developed really badly. The situation improved only a lot later.

And if you had to choose between a film to be developed or saving up for the next (vinyl) records or even your first moped it became pretty quickly pretty clear where the priorities lay. Another issue was the time that lay between taking the photos and then noticing how bad they actually were when you got them back from the lab.

My very first own camera: The Agfamatic 2008 pocket from 2008.

While I thought that the fitting 110 format film cassettes had been discontinued, I found out recently that there is still a niche manufacturer that produces them. In fact, they had been discontinued in about 2009 when the last major manufacturer, Fujifilm, stopped producing them.

But a couple of years later, the nerds from the Lomographic society started the production of a series of different film types in the 110 format. They offer not only black & film stock, but also a range of special color negative and even slide films. So I went ahead and bought a package of three normal color negative films. Unfortunately, it turned out that getting the films developed is going to be a bigger pain (and higher cost) than I imagined, or, rather, had hoped for.

I bought those films just to see how good or bad the image quality coming out of this camera will be and if these images bear a certain artistic charme that would justify keeping the camera for more than just nostalgia. I will discuss the results of this experiment in the second part of this series.

When I dug out the camera from one of my desk drawers, the first question was - would it still work? At first glance, the answer seems to be yes. Mechanically, the film transport is moving, the shutter seems to work just fine. With the age of over 45 years now, the spring mechanism that opened the camera once unlocked rapidly seems to be a bit sluggish but nothing too much to be worried about.

I also found my Natarix for the camera - a simple snap-on device that can be mounted in front of the lens and viewfinder, making it possible to shoot objects between 0.5-1.00m away, so not really a macro.

But the Agfamatic Pocket Lux, an electronic flash that could be mounted to the side, was dead. Either because it simply died (something that electronic flashes sometimes do, even newer ones) or because at some point in the past some battery had leaked and rendered the contacts in the battery compartment useless. I have cleaned them but to no avail. The flash was a bit of a weak spot in the whole system from the very start as the connector fitting into the camera’s flash port was never really fitting and became loose too easily. That much I remember.

A couple of days after I received the Lomo films by mail, I was noticed by Ebay that a luxury, top-of-the-line Agfamatic 6008 was on sale for a whopping 14 Euros plus postage, overall 19 Euros. I couldn‘t say no and made my childhood dream come true.

A childhood dream camera: The Agfamatic 6008 makro pocket (ca. 1977).

At first glance, it seemed to be a bargain. The general condition of the 6008 was good, similar to my 2008. I inserted new batteries, and the exposure automatic seems to work fine. I then loaded a film into the 6008 and started shooting, noticing that using it is not as straightforward as the 2008, but also not super-complicated.

I haven’t found the original price of my first camera yet, but I can say that the Agfamatic 6008 makro pocket that I bought on Ebay, traded originally for almost 300 DM, which was a lot of money back in 1977.

Some thoughts from a digital age perspective

Back in 1975, when the first pocket cameras were thrown on the market by Kodak, Agfa and the likes, they were clearly aimed at a similar but somewhat more modern market as the demographic who would have bought a Kodak Instamatic camera - middle class that wanted to have a portable, easy to use camera. The line of cameras also aimed at a younger target demographic. All that with keeping in mind that nobody really thought of enlarging the photos by more than the standard 9x9cm or 10x10cm sizes.

So reducing the film size and with it, the camera size, seemed to make sense. What the industry came up with was a very small film negative that measured 17x13mm, roughly a quarter of the size of a 35mm film negative.

But because the film grain remained largely the same as in a 35mm film negative, enlarging the small negatives to more than 13x18cm didn’t make a lot of sense as the pictures would blur anyway.

Because of that underlying film grain problem and the target market prices, most camera manufacturers didn’t bother putting in a lot of development and manufacturing efforts into the lenses of the cameras, at least the cheaper models. In my Agfamatic 2008’s case, the lens was a three-element Color Agnar with a focal length of 26mm and a maximum aperture of a whopping f/9.5.

Objektiv Agfamatic 6008 / Solinar — A 26mm f/2.7 Solinar lens with four optical elements on the Agfamatic 6008.

By contrast, the Agfamatic 6008 had a four-element lens with a maximum aperture of f/2.7, a vast improvement. And while the cheaper version was fixed focus, you could actually adjust the focus distance on the Agfamatic 6008.

Now pause for a second and think of this in modern digital terms. The size of the negative of the 110 pocket films is pretty much the same as that of modern digital cameras with a Micro Four-Thirds sensor (MFT sensors are 17.3mm x 13mm compared to the pocket’s 17mm x 13mm).

The focal length of MFT sized digital cameras is usually also compared to the focal length (and maximal aperture) of full frame cameras (with a sensor equaling the old 35mm film negative size of 36mm x 24mm). When doing that comparison MFT / Full Frame, you usually double both the focal length and the maximum aperture.

In the Agfamatic 2008’s case this would have equalled a lens of 52mm focal length with a maximum aperture of f/19. Just let that sink in.

How it all began: My first camera / Part 1

My first photo shoot

My first own camera

Some thoughts from a digital age perspective

How it all began: My first camera / Part 2