Film People have asked, What was your first camera?

And my very first camera as a young lad was a camera acquired by collecting cigarette coupons. My Mother used to own a shop and as a general store they also sold cigarettes and tobacco.

It came into her possession before I was born but when I came on the scene in 1947, I became, like most babies, well documented on film. I guess in the late 50's the camera was given to me and so started a lifetime interest in all things photographic.
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I never had a first camera as a child, my dad had a Kodak Instamatic X15 which he got as a gift and it became the family camera. A few months ago I did some research on it and I realised why it was such an awful camera!! It was made from cheap plastic, and must have had a plastic lens too LOL! It took 126 film I think and used magic cube flashes. We lived in India at the time, so we had film and magic cubes shipped from Canada and the US to us at great cost I imagine as shipping wasn't cheap in the 70's.
When I got married, I used my husband's Nikon EM, which took very good pictures in the right hands but it bit the dust after I dropped it on the beach one day, not one image I took with that camera was nice as I had no idea about the ever important exposure triangle, so my attempts were hugely under/over exposed images and I obviously couldn't use the MF very well LOL! Pics below for nostalgia (not mine).

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View attachment 148636 Dubbed as a "woman's camera"

Earlier this year when I took up photography properly, I started with digital and learnt a great many things before making the switch over to film, so my first film camera I guess would be the mint Minolta 404 AF I got off Ebay, and now 12 cameras later.... Well!
 
My first own camera was a Kodak Ektra 150; found an image on Flickr here. However, it actually got stolen in Paris - my mother's handbag and my jacket pocket where picked when I was 15 or something.

My father gave me a little money to replace the camera, and I added a bit of my own to buy something the felt much more like a "real" camera: the Minolta Hi-Matic GF; I bought one of these for nostalgia's sake:
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Admittedly, it wasn't a lot more sophisticated than the Kodak (if at all), but I shot my first really satisfying images with it. It marked my personal entry into "serious" photography. Unfortunately, the camera I acquired recently doesn't give me images that are as satisfying as those from the original one - duh ...

However, I literally cut my teeth on my father's camera, a Contaflex Prima from the early 1960s; that very camera is in my collection today - it's still a fine shooter, one of the most compact leaf shutter SLRs I know of:
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(Some more funky WB - no reliable way of normalising it in Polarr ... yet; thankfully, the hues suit the respective cameras.)

M.
 
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I only have distant recollections of my first camera. I'm pretty sure it was a Halina, but it looked quite similar to the Yashica picture from @johnson4096 above inasmuch as the light meter was around the lens, but it did not have the rounded edges on the body like the Yashica. I can't find anything similar on camera-wiki.org so I am probably mistaken! I don't believe it had any means of adjusting the exposure, and had zone focus. I know I took loads of photos with it in my early teenage years. I may even still have some of them in boxes in the attic!
 
My first camera was a Praktica STL-3, given to me by my parents for Christmas when I was 18. It was my only camera for over 20 years, and I took many photos with it and the Jenna 50mm f/2.8 lens that came with it. Funny, but GAS and its close cousin, lens lust, never reared their ugly heads during all that time - not until I discovered digital. The Praktica sits on a shelf near my computer desk, and I ran some film through it last year. Still operates perfectly, except for the dead meter. It requires a mercury cell battery of an odd size, so I just used Sunny 16, which worked fine.
 
Funny, but GAS and its close cousin, lens lust, never reared their ugly heads during all that time - not until I discovered digital.
Wish I could say the same, but honestly, I can't: I collected quite a lot of gear even then. The only good thing I can say about this is that I kept most of it, so it's still of value for me today.

M.
 
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I started to use my dads old Pen EES in the early 80's. First camera I bought was a Polaroid OneStep in the early 90's followed by an Oly Superzoom compact soon afterwards. Didn't really get properly into photography as a hobby until 2010 when I picked up an Oly E-P1 as a nostalgic throwback to the EES.
 
First camera was an Agfamatic Pocket 1000 S in the late '70s. It was a source of some frustration; I was unable to make it produce the image I intended. But I loved the Modernist design of it.

I would say that the the first 'real' camera [by which I mean a camera that let me get the intended result] was a well used Yashica FX-3 Super. I can't say I miss it, but I do remember it fondly. I really bonded with that one.


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My first foray was this little fella when I was 15

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My dad later gave me his Canon AE-1 in the 90's and I had fun with it for a while until the shutter broke and it was going to cost a hundred dollars to fix.

I had nothing serious for a while until I got fascinated by the mirrorless revolution in the Sony NEX-3. Not a perfect camera by any means but I could see where it was going and have had several models, currently just having bought the A6400.
 
Goodness, how did I miss this thread...

First camera I used was my Dad’s Zeiss Ikonta which he won in a 2-up game during WWII. The story goes that the fellow he won it from had taken it from a dead german soldier... its just a story, I suspect Dad embellished it.

My own first was a Kodak Instamatic 105, it was fun. I bequeathed it to the parents when I moved on to 35mm. They got a lot of use out of it, and after they passed, both cameras came back to me.
 
First camera- a Kodak Brownie "Holiday", onto an Instamatic 150- with the spring powered advance.
First 35mm camera- Minolta HiMatic 9, bought in 1969 when I was 11. The camera is in perfect working order, I just cleaned the viewfinder, replaced the light seals, and put in a new battery. The 45/1.7 lens is superb on this camera, same basic formula as the Minolta 50/1.8 in Leica mount= which is also very good.
 
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