I took my first photo when I was about 7 years old. Growing up in Germany of the 1970s, it was not a Kodak moment, but an Agfa moment. Anyway, the object in question was a cat on a field that apparently grasped my attention of my new Agfamatic kamera. Processing was expensive (when you had to pay it from your own pocket money), and I had another 23 pictures to take before I would get the film developed. So, it took a couple of weeks to find out that what I had seen had absolutely nothing to do with what the actual picture looked like. But still, it amazed me that it was possible to keep a moment frozen onto paper.
And that amazement never left me.
Later, when I started more seriously (as in: very interested hobbyist), I was lucky that the German Democratic Republic disappeared. With it it’s own film-making (and incredibly polluting) factory, ORWO. But between those two events, the west German mark bought incredible amounts of the ORWO black&white film. I think I must have purchased a 3-digit number of those rolls. I built myself a little robot, that would develop those film-rolls in batches of 4, thus giving me plenty of freedom to experiment.
