Never done a blog before. OK, so I have my Egyptology site and Music site, but as for an actual blog… nope.
I have recently decided to get more serious about Photography. Now I’ve been taking photos for the best part of 30 years, starting off waay back in the dark and distant past with one of these, a Zenith TTL. About as Manual a camera as you can get, although it did at least have TTL metering.
Unfortunately, being young and inquisitive, I decided to find out how it worked, so I very carefully took it apart…
That’ll be that one buggered then. Wasn’t cheap to get it fixed either…
The Zenith was a solid beast of a camera, from a time when Eastern Europe ruled the budget SLR market, While people with rich parents had an Olympus OM10, or even the holy grail of a Canon AE1P us peasants made do with our Zeniths and Prakticas and developed and printed the photos in the school darkroom. Them were the days…
When I got a job, it was time for a new camera. As the Olympus and Canon were still way out of reach I graduated to the new fangled Automatic Exposure Prakticas. In my case this was the B100 (and I’ve still got it). This was a brilliant little thing, small and light and although still just a comparatively cheap camera, it was a massive step up from the Zenith.
Back when I used to visit Egypt regularly I took loads of photos, many of which ended up on the Akhet website.
The little Praktica served me well over there, back in the days when you could get the chemist who developed (ask your parents) the film (ask your parents) to put the piccies onto something called a PhotoCD. Still got a couple of them that have survived the passing aeons, like that one of Philae temple…
Fast forward *cough* a number of years and a number of digital cameras of varying types. I think the first one was a Kodak, Thanks to the wonders of metadata I know it was a DC240.
The DC240 was a great little camera, for it’s time, and it got well used as the Akhet site developed. After that there was a Sony thing that I bought with a “consolidate your debts” loan….
A) That wasn’t very bright and
B) It wasn’t as good as the Kodak 
When I started CackBlabbath I used a digital compact to take the photos for the site. Soon realising the limitations of this I graduated to a Fuji Finepix bridge camera, but that was not without it’s limitations either. Having said that I got some cracking photos out of them, many of which you can see over at CB. In fact to date I have had three different models of FinePix, and they’ve kept CackBlabbath in photos.
This is my favourite though….
OK, I know the quality isn’t great, but it captures the moment perfectly. Isn’t that what photography is supposed to be about ?
Well, yeah, I guess. Actually, as the inspiration to get a proper DSLR, that one turned out to be the most expensive photo I ever took.