I ssed a Nikon Nikkormat manual, the 57 Buick of cameras, along with an old German Leica rangefinder with interchangeable lenses with a Nikkor mount...a rarity. Usually only single lens reflex camera's would have that ability, but leave it to those madcap Germans to figure a way around it. The best of two worlds..Leica cameras and it's pre-war engineering before V-2 rockets, with Japanese Nikkor lenses. When it came to precision optics you can't beat the Japanese or the Swiss with their Alpa line of cameras and high precision optics. I'd even take a Kodak Brownie out for spin when I could find film for it, or film for my slender silver Minox spy camera like you see in the old James Bond films.
The film...ah..the film. 127, 220, 827, 16mm, 35 mm. I would shoot mostly in black and white, Kodak Tri-X 400 and English Ilford. Both at 400 ASA were superb for low light conditions but would push the ASA reading to 1,600 for the ultimate in producing large grain images for that dramatic noir effect. For saturated colors, I would take Kodak Kodachrome slide film rated at ASA 25 and push it to 80...the reds were brilliant as a Canadian Maple in the the fall and the warm yellows were as bright as a Beatles Submarine. I knew a Japanese photographer in Detroit I worked with and he showed me the wonders of shooting with Infrared film, black and white and slide. By using red and yellow filters you could do portraits with an ethereal result in color and the black and white would do amazing things with outdoor greens such as pine trees turning them into a ghostly white against a black background as though the muses of Hades were on the rise and on the wing. Dark, foreboding.
Most of my stuff was shot in old early 20th century building interiors in the downtown area. The owners would let me in and I'd shoot in dusty old attic storage spaces with broken chairs laying about on third floors with only ambient lighting coming in through dust caked windows.. The effects were silver nitrate stunning. Other worldly, the past lurking somewhere in the print..people unseen, maybe prohibitionists, maybe a murder took place there, maybe nothing out of the ordinary happened, maybe it did. These shots and my architectural ones were placed in the Lens Five Gallery in Greektown for a month long showing. Sold a few that I had enlarged to 16 X 20's and felt I was on my way to be the next Ansel Adams...that never happened as I had no Yosemite nearby, only the Ford Rouge Plant and that is a different kind of wilderness.
I wanted to experiment more with portraits so I purchased an old bellows Polaroid black and white camera. I could do the set ups for the portraits and rather then shoot a roll of film, develop them and only then find out the lighting was wrong, I would shoot first with the Polaroid and within seconds could check the lighting and set up and then make adjustments with the Leica. Thank you Dr. Land!
But for color..nothing could beat my Kodachrome for slides ( I used an German Agfa film for the color prints from slides) You could get rich saturation of colors and have the slides made into prints up to at least 5 x 7 without loosing too much quality. If I wanted crisp black and white I would use the Ilford low ASA film and not push it.
I collected cameras over the years and added a rare Mercury model, a 5 X 7 Speed Graphic, the type they used in WWII and Korea for the war correspondents but overall you couldn't beat that Nikkormat or my prized Leica. Bessler enlargers, developing chemicals and a darkroom and a refrigerator full of film. (I would buy my film at a custom commercial film and processing plant that did all the murals and large photos for the Detroit Auto Show..I used them as I could buy film by batch numbers so if I was doing a series that required numerous shots, the color separations would match and be equalized.
I still have two of my cameras..The Nikkormat and the Leica. Now..if I could only find a roll of Ilford to run through them. I even named one of my dogs, Leica, man and photographers best friend.