Brief Love Story
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Brief Love Story
by J. Ramón Palacios

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And so it began
  Medium format
  35mm SLR
  The Exaktas
» The first Nikon
  Her
  The kids
and the Exaktas
  The Nikkormats
  The FE2
  Into the land of Nikon
  The MD-12s
  Upgrading ...
The F4s and beyond
An endless
love story ...
Adventures in the Sierra Madre

The first Nikon ...

And all of the sudden, Japan, until then the country of the cheap bad copies, under the reconstruction of my General McArthur had discovered professor Demming, quality control grand guru (to whom no one had paid any attention in his own country) and jumped into the international market with an impressive oriental beauty: the Nikon F first and soon later the Nikkormat (Nikomat inside Japan). One of them was ....... mine.
.
Nikkormat
Nikkormat FS - Nippon Kogaku K.K. - 1965, Tokyo, Japan
.

The magistrate, mi revered father, could not be left behind in this technology race, with sacrifices or not -we never knew- he made himself the happy owner of a Nikon F Photomic, the first professional camera with a reliable exposure meter integrated in the pentaprism. An extraordinary innovation, although it never won over us in the delicious guess of the precise exposure for the high contrast brightly lit and dark scenes and the backlights.  Nikon F Photomic
He must have loved it very deeply because to his first-born, 'the hope of the family' (me, 'moi') he only allowed for one touch and one twist of its lens, once, at the time of stating very solemnly: "This camera is not ours, ... it is mine". And so it became the first camera from him that I respected.  Of course, after I appropriated all of his German lenses and a extraordinary French beauty: an Angenieux 35mm f/2.5, for my Exaktas. Angenieux wide angle lens

At home maybe there were not many luxuries, but no scarcity either; and if there ever was, we never knew about it or felt it; there was always enough for books, good food, good clothing and quality cameras and film, in that order; "everything else is accessory".
 

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