The Good Ole Days

Okay, go ahead and laugh. That is me, circa 1978. Notice three cameras and various prime lenses. That was once the way, zoom lenses for the most part were a lot slower than prime(fixed focal length lenses), most were fairly heavy to boot. And not as sharpe.

The cameras are mounted with a 20mm, a 105mm and my trusty 180f2.8. In that huge Leitz bag hanging from my shoulder I usually had a 24mm, a 35mm and and 85mm. Most times an old 300f4.5 Nikkor was stuffed in the bag. There was a flash, a bunch of “AA” batteries and lots of film. Lots of film. I carried a huge load of both Tri-X and slide film. The film was most often Fuji.

Also note the huge hand-held two-way radio hanging from my bag. This was way before cell phones. My first handheld cell phone was about the same size. On the other side hangs a Pentax Spot Meter. There was a handheld Sekonic incident light meter in the bag. Shooting slide film required fairly accurate metering. The meters were a bit of a holdover from earlier days when my beloved Nikons had terrible built-in meters. The F2-S hanging on my left side was Nikon’s first really reliable meter for the F/F2 bodies. The little FM’s hanging on the other side had good meters.

By the way, this photograph was done on Kodachrome, which Kodak has now discontinued.

The times have certainly changed, and photographically speaking, these are the ‘Good Ole Days.”