What the Traveller Saw. Eric Newby

       Introduction

      MY FIRST CAMERA was a pretty feeble affair. This much was obvious, even to me, when I received it as a present on my seventh birthday. It came from some far-off place I had never heard of up until then. I think it was Lithuania, but there were lots of places I had never heard of at that time. This camera took pictures the size of the smaller sort of Lithuanian postage stamp – that is, when it took any at all – with ludicrous results. It came in a carrying case made of cardboard, together with three rolls of film, and when these were used up the only way to get more was to buy a return ticket to Lithuania.

      My next camera was a No. 2 Box Brownie, an Easter present from my parents when I was about ten, bought from a Mr Powell who had a photographic business on the seafront at Swanage, Dorset. I was mad about birds in those days, and it was with a copy of British Birds and How to Identify Them (or some such title) and this camera, which had a fixed exposure of approximately 1/25th at f/11 (the shutter sounded like a portcullis falling), that I attempted to photograph them. As a result, I had, until recently, a large collection of negatives and prints, 3¼ × 2¼ ins, of the boughs of windswept trees and Purbeck drystone walls from which the birds I was trying to photograph had already flown away. Nevertheless, I loved my No. 2 Box Brownie.

      My first precision camera, and one of the best cameras I have ever possessed, was a Zeiss Super Ikonta; a tiny, folding, bellows camera with an F.3.5 Tessar lens, a Compur shutter and a coupled rangefinder which took 16 pictures on 3¼ × 2¼ in roll film. This was the camera I took with me in 1938 on a round-the-world voyage. I didn’t have an exposure meter, but by using something known as a Burroughs Wellcome Exposure Calculator, which came in the back of a diary, I got some surprisingly good results, considering how little I knew

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