About Me
Hello!
Just a few words to introduce myself...
I'm Philip Walker, 64 years old from Skipton in North Yorkshire, England and I have been into cameras and photography for as long as I can remember.
I blame my late father for this, he was always into photography from an early age and in the 1950's and 60's ran the local camera club in my home town. There were always cameras around the house from Leica's to Box Brownies and everything in between. All sorts of old and oddball stuff, one camera I will never forget was stuffed onto the top shelf of a cupboard in the living room, it was one of those big black Soho single lens reflexes but with a massive wartime Aero Ektar lens on the front.
Negatives hung drying in the living room, near the back door, pinned to the picture rail and weighted at the bottom. Family entertainment included a lot of slide shows and there were always the latest black and white mounted prints about the house in readiness for the next competition or exhibition. So it was no surprise that I took up photography as a kid.
I got my first camera when I was about 8 or 9, an Ensign Vul-Vue given to me my one of my Dads mates, George Throup, a local milkman and fellow camera club member. I can remember my first film that I took down at Skipton Railway station where all the trains were parked up. They all came out!
Later, when I went to secondary school, I joined the school camera club with a couple of my mates and we all took CSE Photography after school. By this time, the mid 1970's, I had progressed to an Exa 500 with a Ensign Selfix as backup, both sort of 'borrowed' from my Dad.
We had two really good photography teachers at Aireville School, a Mr Monkhouse (who also taught art and ran an art shop in town), and Mrs Scott, who always lent me the darkroom key so I could do some printing when I was bunking off lessons I did not like! The Exa I used until I was 21, after which I pooled all of my birthday money, my savings and bought a new Praktica B200. I used both of them for the next decade or more along with an old very early Exa I bought with my first ever wage packet, from Hayhursts in Nelson, a proper camera shop in a nearby town.
Camera collecting added itself on nicely to photography, which developed into camera dealing and stalls at PCCGB and other local camera fairs.
Later Dawn (my wife) and I wrote and took photographs for Vintage Scooter Scene Magazine for a few years and now, after retiring and having a bit more time, I'm attempting this blog, with which I hope to combine my two passions of photography and old cameras into photography with old cameras, with a little bit of a bias towards cameras of the old East Germany.
I hope you enjoy the blog
Phil ... always with a camera or drink in hand!
