I had known since the age of about 15 that if I wanted to pursue photography as a hobby, I really needed to get a 35mm SLR. The problem was that the popular Japanese SLRs of the day were well beyond my pocket. At last, though, I was able to scrape together the $100 necessary to purchase a secondhand Praktica LTL.

The Prackticas were a venerable range of cheapish SLRs mass-produced in East Germany. In the mid-60s they had undergone a complete redesign for the "L" series, and the LTL, introduced in 1968, had the addition of a match-needle TTL light meter. It was a big heavy camera, and when you pressed the shutter button everyone for 30 metres around knew that you had taken a picture! (Incidentally, the Praktica L series pioneered the vertically-moving multibladed shutters that are now universal. All the other manufacturers were still using rubberised cloth roller-blind shutters.) In Australia, Prakticas were rather despised as being cheap - what you bought if you couldn't afford a Spotmatic. So I was rather pleased to find that in Europe (especially England) they were held in somewhat higher esteem - so much so that the brand name is still being recycled today.

This camera was my pride and joy. The quality of my photography increased considerably, as did the amount of gear I was lugging around. Over the next few years I acquired the bits and pieces of a serious amateur - 28mm and 200mm lenses to go with the 50mm, flash, filters, extension tubes, tripod, etc. I even got into the processing side, with a cheap enlarger, tanks, trays, and all the accessories of the darkroom. As my affluence expanded I was able to add the occasional roll of colour slide film to my arsenal, although my pocket never extended to home colour processing. This film was usually the cheap off-brand stuff that (unknown to me at the time) was movie stock re-rolled onto 35mm cassettes. As a result, a lot of my slides from this period have a brilliant pink cast! Nevertheless, slides were far cheaper than prints in those days and in due course I acquired a cheap manual projector and subjected my family to the fruits of my labours. They bore this well, as parents generally do. Eventually I gave up processing my own b/w, as my occupation of the only bathroom in the house for hours on end eventually became too much for my family to tolerate, and shot slide film exclusively.

Looking at the camera today, the angled front shutter release does look a bit odd, but I really liked the ergonomics of the camera. With the right thumb on the film advance lever, the index finger falls naturally on the black metering switch (stop-down, of course) and the middle finger on the shutter release itself. The whole compose-meter-release sequence worked very smoothly. Much better (I told myself) than having the meter switch on the opposite side of the lens mount like the Pentax, or in the advance lever like the Nikon.