JohnnieRockets

I have been shooting since 1970 (high school - grade ten) and started off with my Dad's Yashica Rangefinder camera. I believe it was the "Yashica Electro 35" but I can't be sure. When I was in high school, my Dad enrolled me in a private photography school which I attended two nights per week. Everything we shot there was with 4x5 film cameras even when we went on location. The following year I purchased my first SLR camera was the Zenit-E and in 1972 I sold that camera system to a buddy of mine and picked up a twin-lens medium format camera, the Yashica Mat-124 G. My photography teacher suggested that I should buy this and learn using only the standard lens and to not bother with the faux wide-angle or faux tele-photo adapters. Wow! What a camera and what a learning tool. This same teacher suggested that I get a hand-held light meter and learn to use that so I bought one and I took it with me everywhere I went even if I was just riding the subway in Montreal with my buddies. In 1977 I jumped into the Nikon world of photography and up until just recently (Fall of 2020) I was all in on Nikon. In the Fall of 2020 I moved on over to the FujiFilm X Series and am loving it. Mind you I did rent Fuji camera for two years before finally deciding on the X-T4. I look forward to the day I get one of their GFX camera bodies. Over the years I have had many medium format camera systems from the Yashica Mat-124 G to Mamiya twin-lens to Bronica ETRS and eventually two Hassleblad 553ELX Motorized Camera Bodies. And then we went digital and I sold all my film cameras except for one Nikon 801s with 24mm f2.8 lens and my Contax 167 MT with two lenses; 28mm f2.8 Carl Zeiss T* Distagon and a 50mm f1.7 Carl Zeiss T* Planar lens. I'll bet not many people can remember when 28mm was the standard wide-angle lens before 24mm became the wide-angle standard.