Praktica-L Photography

We're still sorting through stuff that's come back from my Dad's house. Amongst everything, I found my old film camera. It was bought around 1981 or 1982, when we had a bit of money left over from my grandparent's estate. We changed the family car, getting rid of the old Ford Escort Mk I estate and replacing it with a Morris Ital (Big mistake. Huge), and bought ourselves some luxuries. I can't remember what my Mother got as part of this spending spree, but my Dad bought an Olympus OM10 and I was given a Praktica MTL3.

The Praktica was made in East Germany - by the feel of the thing, in a factory that made tractors for the rest of the year. It's agricultural in a good way though - Don McCullin's Nikon F1 famously stopped a bullet, the Praktica feels like it could stop an artillery shell.

The camera is - almost - entirely mechanical. Only the light meter requires electrical power, which is provided by a single PX625 battery. As far as I can make out, it is in working order and I do have the urge to lay my hands on a roll of Tri-X and try it out. However, this is probably the engineer rather than the photographer in me doing the thinking.

At this point, its customary to say that I learned everything that I know about photography whilst using this camera. And I could say that, but it would be untrue. The sad fact is that I made very few decent images - and no good ones - with the Praktica. 

I put this down to a number of factors - for instance the whole business of acquiring a skill was that much harder in the days before the internet - but ultimately the immediacy and creative control of digital imaging are the things that have made the difference for me. Waiting for a bunch of disappointing images to come back from the lab sapped my enthusiasm pretty quickly. My Dad didn't persist with his Olympus, either.

Anyway, having found the thing, I had the urge to make some images of it, so out came the light tent and the results are above. I was aiming for a 'product shot' vibe - I think that I had some vague idea that there was some humour to be had in presenting an object with it origins in a factory in the Eastern Bloc in the manner of modern consumer iconography. And there's the whole post-modern thing about photographing a camera.

In the same vein, I love the fact that there is a screw head just below the 'MLT' model ident - I can't imagine a marketing department allowing that in this day and age.

The other thing that I notice is how plain the back of the camera is, compared to a modern dSLR. However, the overall look is ironically very similar to the Olympus OM-D.

As a parting shot, I would note that I couldn't have made this image with the Praktica, which is the crucial difference between then and now from my perspective.