At my home when I was a kid in the 1970s there was an entire shelf in a bookcase stuffed full of bright yellow National Geographic magazines, and I was always fascinated by them. There was something about them which drew me to look at them time and again and also something that led me to save them from the bin and take them with me when I left home. A few years ago I needed to clear these out of the loft to make way for a loft conversion so most of the titles from the mid 1970s and 1980s were recycled. There were a whole bunch however that I could not part with.
As well as the fantastic photographs by which we all know NG for there were the advertisements that fascinated me mainly for cameras. These probably sowed the seed for a love of great photography and SLR type cameras which were becoming so popular in the late 60s and 1970s. Although my dad had a Nikkormat SLR it obviously wasn’t for us kids to play with so my first ‘taste’ of a camera was an old Kodak Brownie 127 which accompanied me on school trips. This was quickly followed by a ‘modern’ Kodak Instamatic 110 type camera when I was about 10. So no sniff of any classic looking SLR’s me! Then when I was about 20 I started to look in camera shop windows at the used SLR kit but in the pre digital age this gear was so expensive and held it’s value well. In the end I went with the flow and got my first Canon, alas not an SLR but a Megazoom Canon 35-105mm (3x zoom) f3.5-8 lens. This seemed fantastic at the time but had no manual controls and I didn’t have a clue an f-stop or aperture was! All I did was feed it Kodachrome 64 (why would I shoot anything else?) though and try to fool it by placing my finger over the light detecting area. Needless to say I got a good few blurry shots with such slow film and THAT lens. Somebody really should have pointed out to me that an SLR would really suit what I was trying to do.
There were also some great looking adverts for fantastic looking cars..
Remember Gorillas In The Mist? The 1988 film starring Sigourney Weaver playing Dian Fossey, a scientist studying mountain gorillas resulting tragic consequences. It was the story of a true project part funded by the National Geographic and it’s fascinating to read the original accounts from 1970 and 1971 that the film was based upon.
And just to prove to all you kids that dreams do come true…
My QL17 G-III. The 'poor mans Leica'
They now sit in my young sons room and he too delights in the large detailed maps and photographs within them.