Old friends

As some of you will know I have made a start on digitising my drawer full of 35 mm slides. Today I thought you might like to see the camera that took the vast majority of them. It is a Leica 3b which I received from my parents for my 21st birthday. The camera was made in 1939 and has a lens from 1935. I hasten to add that it was far from new when I received it! Sitting next to it is the light meter that I used, a Weston Master IV dating from 1965. Photography was rather more complex in those days!

The "extra" is a newly scanned slide, a lucky dip from the dauntingly large box labelled "family slides". It features Mrs T and our first Talpid and was taken looking down onto Polin beach in the far north-west of Scotland. You may have spotted that the Talpid's left hand is rather heavily bandaged. The previous day she had been playing on the hillside and found an old broken bottle; inevitably she sliced open her hand. The local doctor was on leave but his locum was staying in the local hotel and thus the necessary stitching was carried out in the public bar!