my brush with greatness

[pc10pc]

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or: how oxfam disinherited me

 

i started taking pics a few years ago, just after i forgot to return an employers camera when i left the job.

a 3mp nikon, it wasnt great but i had fun with it. then i started looking into film cameras, and bought a holga as i liked the cool effects, and still do.

bought a few other film cameras, including a FED5 rangefinder. and it was while i was showing my mum it she said 'your grandad had cameras like that....a zeiss taht had bellows and a leica'

i work as a civil engineering surveyor and had used leica instruments and was aware they are cameras of distinction. for a brief moment i thought it would be sitting somewhere, just waiting to be removed from some vintage packaging.

then she dropped the bomb. turns out after my gran died my aunt took the cameras and put them up for sale in the local oxfam (a UK charity store) where the leica went for the pricely sum of £75.

i never seen the camera (think i seen a picture taken by it though) but my grandad was a pharmacist and a WW2 aerial photographer, so i assume it was a cracker, and he would have maintained it impeccably. I imagine it must have been from 40s/50s.

there's no real point to this story, just felt like relating it to a few people who would grasp the annoyance burning in me.

 

 

ps

if you bought a vintage leica for £75 from oxfam, PM me. please

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[luigi bertolotti]

Aaaghhhh... well, you are anyway on a good patch with your FED (it's a rangefinder camera with 39mm=leica lens screw mount, right ?)... it was 1975 when I bought a Zorky 4 (very similar to FED, no exposure meter), and 4 years after entered my first Leica (an old screw mount body, probably very similar to your "uninherited"...)... and still I'm using and loving Leicas...

 

If you start to really appreciate the way of taking pics you enjoy with your FED, remember, it's almost unevitable one day or another you'll have a Leica.