| Photo: Leonp |
Happy World Camera Day! In honor of the day, we are sharing your responses to last week’s Question of the week. We asked you which camera was (or is) your most memorable, and to share a photo of the camera and an interesting story about it. This is a spin-off of another question asked a couple of months ago about which camera brand was your favorite, but this time, it may not have been your favorite camera brand that took the spotlight.
Several of you, as expected, mentioned more prominent brands like Canon, Nikon and Sony, but others made unique selections dating back to brands that no longer exist. While the technology of those cameras is now dated, dusty and rusty, the photographs and the memories they conjure up are forever, as they say. With our community over 25 years old and its members’ collective experience spanning well beyond that, there were plenty of memories shared.
Keep reading to see which cameras our readers chose as their most memorable.
Your most memorable camera
Leonp: “In the late 1970s, my nephew bought a Pentax camera. My father was jealous, so he bought one for himself, too. My father wasn’t really into high-tech stuff and never made it through the manual, so I must have sneaked into his bedroom to take the above photo in the mirror using a diving lamp as a light source, which, if you look closely, is also a selfie of me. It took years for it to become my camera, and it changed the way I looked at the world forever.”
Daithi: “The Nikon D850. It was a troubling time for the birth of mirrorless cameras. They were all basically the ugly litter of the well-established DSLR world. For me, this camera kept on truckin’ for many years. The D850 had peerless resolution/image quality, and still does to a large degree.”
GruberSrb: “Minolta Dynax 9xi (with booster). It was hated in photography circles, but its tech and fabulous design remind me of a ballerina in ‘Swan Lake’. It still works flawlessly with a carbon shutter 1/12000sec like new, despite very heavy usage over the last 30 years in some of the worst conditions on Earth, from Patagonia to Kamchatka.”
Thorstenwulff: “My first love was the F3. In the summer of 1987 she went to New York with me, and a box of T-Max 400. Paired with the 24/2,8 it was my perfect combo for street photography, even if you had to get a bit closer. The other Lens was the 105/2,5.”
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| Photo: lonewolf1983 |
lonewolf1983: “I present you the Sony A850. I had been shooting with the Sony APS-C SLT cameras (A57/A77/A77ii) and picked up the A850 to complement them and check out what the full-frame thing was all about. I took it soon after on a trip to New Zealand, and captured some amazing images with its 24mp sensor, rock solid build quality, amazing OVF and IBIS, clicking that shutter and hearing the mirror/shutter was just glorious.”
LJ – Eljot: “Canon G3: My first digital camera. Introduced in 2003, a 4MP digital compact. This one was aimed at enthusiasts and featured RAW images. Unusual at that time. Base ISO is 50, and it is basically unusable at the max ISO of 400. It takes about a full second to take a picture after pressing the shutter button. A terrible camera, but I learned to love the tilt-screen. And at ISO 50, the images look quite good, actually. Good macro capability as well. And a hot shoe with full flash compatibility.”
fatplanediaries: “The Sony a6300. It overheated like crazy and had rolling shutter only comparable to the most wobbly of jelly, but it was the camera where I honed my photography and learned videography. I shot my film school application film with it on a homemade gimbal.”
GeoffRG: “The Olympus OM1: I bought it in 1979, and it traveled with me to Seattle, Tanzania, Trinidad, and Australia. I sold it in 1990, along with my OM2n, a pair of OM4s, and a pile of lenses and accessories. I still don’t understand why Olympus discontinued the motor drive system.”
wood_gnome: “The Certo SL 110, because it was my very first camera. I bought it secretly and conspiratorially from pocket money when I was 9 (!) in March 1980.”
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| Photo: Gato Amarillo |
Gato Amarillo: “Always my favorite, my Deardorff. The above is a 5×7 model, but I used it with a 4×5 back. The lens is a Schneider Symmar 180mm, a longish normal for 4×5. Contrary to what most might expect, I used it mostly as a portrait camera. The camera was a basket case when I got it. My partner said it looked like something that had fallen off a truck on the freeway. You may notice a couple of odd knobs – I was never able to get together a full matching set.”
Don Sata: “I loved my X-Pro1 to the point that I sold a Sony full frame prize camera from the Sony World Photography awards to get this gem with three primes (18, 27 and 60 mm). In this picture, the camera is posing with a set of Zeiss lenses lent to me for a month. I shot the camera, banged it on rocks, got it splashed, scratched and dented until the shutter died.”
Otto Union: “Without a doubt, my long-gone Leitz Minolta CL with 40/2 Rokkor and 90/4 Elmar lenses. I bought these with tax refund money in April 1978. It was my first real camera and a real gem. It was extremely pocketable and accompanied me to many concerts in the late 70s / early 80s. It was stolen from my residence in 1983, and I’m still gutted about it.”
cbf_si: “I was introduced to photography at 17 during the era of the first AF film cameras in the second half of the 1980s. My classmates were enthusiastic about cameras like the Canon EOS 650 and the Minolta Dynax 7000, but the Minolta X-700 caught my eye. I only got a used one when I got a job in 1998. Like many others, I initially equipped myself with the classic three focal lengths, 28 mm, 50 mm, and 135 mm. Today, I have lenses with focal lengths from 7.5 mm to 250 mm.”
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| Photo: RLHN |
RLHN: My most memorable (and first serious) film camera was the Petri 7S, a rangefinder film camera with a selenium cell meter that required no batteries and used “match needle” metering, which made it trivial to tweak exposure. I bought it “used” at a local camera store with my high school graduation gift funds, after someone traded it in because it was “too complicated”. It was barely used, if at all. I took many great photos with it for years, until the photo cell sadly died.
BobKo: I’ve had many cameras, but the camera I remember most fondly is a Panasonic Lumix GH5. I primarily shoot video, and the GH5 was just a video beast. It made shooting really high-quality video a pleasure, and it really upped the quality of my YouTube uploads. Suddenly, my videos looked as good as the big boys. I got my GH5 in 2018, and it still works fine today — I use it for a back-up camera and to shoot time lapses. What a great camera!
Gramar: The one stand out camera from the many I’ve owned over the past 50 + years has to be the original Sony RX100. I bought mine new in 2016 four years after they were launched. I found it ticked every box and was always my go to camera until I sold it in 2024 for almost what I paid for it new. It went everywhere with me despite owning a number of other camera during those times.
So many other stories we couldn’t fit in this article are shared in the forums. Thanks to everyone who took the time to explain what your most memorable cameras are and why.
Keep watch for the next Question of the week every other Wednesday to participate in this series. New questions are posted here on the homepage and in the forums. We can’t wait to read and share your stories!