Who do you think you are? David Bailey?

I have been hanging a door in our basement today, which needed to be trimmed after a new carpet was laid.

It has been another wet and dreich day, so no opportunity to go out and take any photographs. I was tidying up in the loft and I found my trusty old Olympus OM-1, so decided to take a few shots of it. Bought in 1973/4 the camera is a bit dusty, but still in working order.

There were quite a few great SLRs produced in the 1970s but if I had to choose one it would be the OM-1. For nostalgic reasons and because of its design, feel, size and performance.

The very first model was presented at Photokina in Cologne in 1972 and was called the Olympus M-1. Thirteen years earlier, the release of the Nikon F had done much to make the 35mm SLR the standard choice for professionals and higher-spending amateurs who would previously have used Leica and other rangefinders, but it had driven the market towards heavy and bulky cameras. The Olympus M-1 changed this and with it began a reduction of size, weight and noise of the 35mm SLRs. It was designed by a team led by Maitani Yoshihisa, who had already created the Olympus Pen and Pen F cameras, noted for their compactness.

The OM-1 was the first product in the OM Series. It is an all-mechanical SLR. It has a very large viewfinder with interchangeable screens but a fixed prism. It also has a through-the-lens exposure meter controlling a needle visible in the viewfinder. The OM-1 earned wide acclaim as the world's smallest and lightest 35mm single-lens reflex camera. Olympus employed a wide range of innovative ideas to reduce body size and the noise and shock caused by shutter operation. Shutter durability was also improved, resulting in a system capable of withstanding 100,000 operations. The finder screen could be replaced from the lens mount side.

The OM system became a favourite of all those for whom weight without optical compromise was a primary consideration. OMs have been around the world with some of the National Geographic photographers convinced enough to give up their Canon's or Nikon's, they have also been to the top of Everest with climber Chris Bonington. Professional photographers like David Bailey and Lord Lichfield had a close association with the OM system.

In the late 70s and early 80s David Bailey famously endorsed the Olympus' Trip 35 camera in a long-running advertising campaign in which he played himself alongside a series of stars including George Cole, Phil Daniels and Eric Idle.

The phrase -"Who do you think you are? David Bailey" - addressed to Bailey by a series of people who failed to recognise him - became synonymous with photographic pretension and turned Bailey into a household name.

His favourite cameras included the twin lens Rollei 2.8, the Olympus OM-1 and the Leica M7.

February 2014 will see the National Portrait Gallery open its doors to the biggest ever retrospective of David Bailey's work, entitled Bailey's Stardust . For the man who was linked to the cream of the model crop in the 60's and 70's, and discovered Jean Shrimpton, the exhibition of 250 portraits is set to be a landmark celebration of a career spanning five decades.