You know that feeling when you stumble across something which transports you back through time to a point in your life that seems so far removed from the present? A mini tsunami of wistful nostalgia hit me the other day when the Postman came and I opened the cocoon of bubble wrap to expose a camera almost identical to my first 'proper' single lens reflex, a slightly crude but awesomely reliable tool which, like me, survived Art school and college, it survived American airbase protests, rock against racism, motorcycles, the eighties, it was a clenched fist of Socialism hanging round my neck, it was bollocks to Thatcher and Reagan's intercontinental ballistic love affair, conservatism and all that shit.
My Praktica MTL3 was just one of over eight hundred thousand from East Germany made between 1978 and 1984 and it served me very well through hectic years until I traded it in against an even older Pentax SV with its Super Takumar lens in a camera shop on Queen's road in Watford. The camera changes but the pictures don't.
Fast forward forty-odd years, when chance led me to a really nice example at a bargain price of a mere £9 for the body only. You can't do much with £9 these days, it's a gallon of petrol or a couple of cups of tepid, coffee flavoured froth with a chocolatey pattern on top and a stupid name. I already owned a couple of M42 lenses to fit it, including the original 'kit' lens supplied with the camera, the pentacon 50mm f1.8 which I picked up somewhere for next to nothing, and which completed my purchase perfectly.
I've got a few cameras, and a few lenses, including some well regarded marques with names that other other camera owners might go 'ooooh' over, one could reasonably argue that I have 'better' cameras and lenses, but there is something about this chunky, utilitarian brick from the wrong side of the Berlin wall.
Although made in the early '80's it is basic mechanical technology and design from the 1960's, a lump of metal and clockwork, steel and brass, springs and gears which, at the time, was seen as regressive, cheap, backward in a brave new world whose shelves were filling with plastic battery powered electronics, but forty years later, how many of those electronic marvels have melted into landfill, eaten from the inside out, corroded by the batteries that powered them. But the clockwork still...works - it can be serviced, lubricated and repaired - sure, East German quality control was somewhat akin to 1970's British car manufacture, I grew up to a chorus of asthmatic wheezing, curses and churning starter motors as a nation on full choke went to work on a cold morning. Unspectacular design and dated technology which, if you were lucky enough to buy one that wasn't made on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning, with some basic care and maintenance, will run forever. Yes, it is known for issues that affect all cameras to some extent, more often than not caused by sitting unused in a box for thirty years, dried out lubricants, bad treatment and people dismantling them and not putting them back together properly. I've also heard about shutters sticking open, meters stopping working all of which means that, after four decades, these 'rubbish' East European cameras are still going wrong less often as two-year-old digital SLRs.
There are loads of reviews online which describe all the technical stuff I really cannot be bothered to delve into here, beyond saying that the 'L' series Prakticas (in general) are well-designed and built to last, solid, beautiful, mechanical manual tools designed and built by East German VEB Pentacon in Dresden.
It's like being re-united with an old comrade.