The first camera that I can remember using was an old Brownie Box camera, which was a very basic camera, but it took good black and white photographs. I took photographs with the Brownie only occasionally as my parents took most of the photographs and because the price of film and developing meant that, we only used the camera on high days and holidays. The Brownie was the only camera that I remember my family owning before I got my own camera.

The first camera I had came as a Christmas present in the year 1958 the camera was a Kodak Bantam Colorsnap. The camera was made in the UK between 1955 and 1959 and its listed price was £11 18s 6d. This was quite a lot of money to my family so the camera was my main present that Christmas. This camera was designed to use Kodachrome colour film which produced either slides or colour photographs.

My family was a working class family and so could not afford for me to go shooting off rolls of film especially not colour film which was really expensive. This camera was not only the first one I owned but also the first one we had that took colour photographs. I remember early that Christmas morning peering over the end of my bed to see if Santa had been and there was the pillowcase that I had put out the night before but now it was no longer empty instead it bulged with lots of brightly wrapped odd shaped packages.

The thrill of seeing the bulging pillowcase was something special because in those days we only got presents on our birthdays and at Christmas so we experienced these times as something very special. I do not think children of today get that experience as much as we did because getting stuff is now a normal everyday thing. I remember opening up the package that contained my camera on Christmas morning my dad had loaded the film before he wrapped it so it was ready to go.

The camera came with its own case and strap and flash and the bulbs to fit the flash. The body of the camera was metal so it had a real solid feel to it and I thought its shape made it look cool and modern. Most of the cameras in use at that time that I had seen were of the old box camera type. I felt very swish with my camera hanging round my neck in its own case.

As good and as modern as this camera was it was still quite a long time from taking the photo to seeing the result, not like today when you get a digital camera and you can see the result right away. Colour photography was a new idea for most ordinary people and for a long time even people with cameras that were capable of taking coloured photographs for most of the time still took the majority of their photographs using black and white films because the black and white film and the processing was so much cheaper than that for colour.

To give you some idea of how expensive my mum thought this was, my mum wanted to make sure that we got our moneys' worth out of the colour film in my new camera. That Christmas my young brother got a Nottingham Forest football kit as one of his presents and one of the first photographs I took was of him in this strip. My mother wanted to make sure that we used a many colours as we could so as not to waste the colour film. My dad at this time was a Coal Miner and at the Pit where he worked, they use to sell subsidized bath towels. My dad like most miners would get through towels because it was necessary for him to take a bath each time after work.

What has this towel to do with my camera taking colour photos I can almost hear you asking; well I tell you all this because the pit towels were multicoloured. My mum endeavouring to get her moneys' worth sent me to get one of these multicoloured pit towels to place behind my brother so that we could use as many colours as possible.

It was quite a while before I got to see the results of those photographs I took on my first film.  I found the waiting time between the taking of a photograph and the finished print or slide very hard back then. Now after experiencing the immediacy of the digital cameras I don’t think I would have the patience to wait for a film to be processed even using the one hour processing.

I have just realized I have come full circle my latest digital camera is a Kodak and it too was a Christmas present this time from my daughter.