Origins - Mono Monday (#MM91)

My passion for photography ORIGINATED at 7 years old making contact prints with my grandmother, using either daylight or, more often, gaslight, on 'gaslight paper'. Her camera was certainly a folding Kodak and could have been a 620 Junior De-Luxe similar to that shown here. The wartime blackout blinds were still in place in her day-to-day living room (the 'front room' was used only for guests or my piano lessons) so there was no need for a darkroom. The camera shown is beautifully engineered with a 'Kodon' shutter which does not need cocking and touches like chromed dome-head screws covering the two tripod mount holes. I'll blip something from it sometime but first I'll have to respool a 120 film onto a 620 reel.

The ORIGINS of my years of 35mm photography were in the 1970s when I acquired an Olympus OM-1, itself the ORIGIN of many features we came to expect from any 'serious' SLR as they were introduced in the later models in the OM series - the OM-2 (first TTL metering) and OM-4 (multi-point metering system).

My acceptance of auto-focus ORIGINATED with the Contax AX, acquired when I realised that my deteriorating eye sight was leading to mis-focussed pictures when shooting in a hurry. Its unique auto-focus system is able to use a manual focus lens (by moving the film plane) and this has the added bonus that S/S macros can be taken without the need for a macro lens or extension tubes so, eg, with the 50mm F/1.4 Zeiss Planar, certainly one of the best 'standard lenses' ever made.