This old beauty is now more than a quarter of a century old. A photographer called Phil gave it to me for nothing when we were both working at the Dover Express newspaper - my first employer. I was a trainee news reporter on the Express for a couple of years and probably learned more there than I have anywhere else - school and university included. It was a great place to work, even though I was only paid something like £5K when I started. I'm beginning to sound like a Hovis ad now, so I'll move on.
The A-1 was my only camera for years. I've taken thousands of very bad photos with it, a couple of hundred decent ones and maybe a handful of excellent ones. Its proudest moment was probably when it nearly got me killed on our honeymoon. We were on safari in South Africa and keeping as quiet as we could in a hide near a watering hole in the hope that some decent sized beasts would show up. Sure enough, a massive bull elephant came to drink and of course I took his picture. The trouble was that the shutter was so loud he heard it - more importantly, it really pissed him off. His ears started flapping, he stamped his foot and started swaying in a rather obviously agitated way. Then he did a couple of little mock charges, which filled me with fear - a fear that became almost blind terror when I realised that our hitherto rather cocksure guide was also bricking it. He actually advised us to start running away if memory serves, which can't be the best thing to do when faced with a charging elephant, surely.
Anyway, we survived, obviously, and the A-1 continues to function perfectly well despite being chucked in a cupboard for the past decade, a victim of my infatuation with digital photography. I wonder if any of the fancy-arsed digital cameras I've owned and plan to own in the future would be so forgiving.
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