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Has a specific camera ever opened up or transformed your photography?

Nothing ever changed the way i photograph more than the years I spent working with my 5x7" Deardorff.

 
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That espresso machine would certainly open up and transform my life!
 
I've had two cameras that have transformed my photography.

The first is my 1985 Nikon F3 HP, I still have it, plus another and for decades it has been dragged everywhere and used in some interesting environments, and has never let me down, either mechanically or in some of the special applications it has been used for. Be that on a telescope, six hour night time exposures in deserts, crashed along with myself from motorcycles, used in a studio at 6 frames per second with a bulk loaded film back for a commercial television advertisement where it was driven by an insane mains powered motor drive system. Took fantastic travel pictures as well, and still does.

The second is my Shen Hao 4x5" wooden folder. I had used 4x5" and 8x10" monorail cameras in a studio environment and knew how and what advantages sheet film cameras possessed. I picked up a couple of 4x5" monorail cameras for personal use, but they were rather difficult to travel with.

After using my Shen Hao HZX45-IIA for a short time, I quickly realised just how flexible and solid it was. Now that I have an array of focal lengths that satisfy my needs, plus a bag bellows, photography with this camera is just wonderful; it will see me out........
 
BrianShaw said:
That espresso machine would certainly open up and transform my life!
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That machine certainly did change my coffee drinking life! there's coffee & then there's espresso!
 
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In the early 1950's I moved up from a folding Kodak with a f/13 meniscus lens in a one speed shutter to a Leica 111f with a f/1.4 Nikkor lens. We might also remember the changes a few Kodak films made in our photography: Kodachrome, Tech Pan. and Recording Film 2475.
 
Nikon D200. The Nikon creative lighting system paired with High Speed Sync and instant feedback from digital image.
 
Not a specific camera, but moving from zoom lenses to primes has completely changed my photography. Never went back to zooms...
 
While every camera I try influences my work in some way or other, I think the two biggest game-changers for me have been my Rolleiflex and my Century Master Studio Portrait camera. The Rolleiflex was a game-changer because it showed me how to really look at the world with a camera, because it just gets out of the way. I had to accept the idea of only one lens, but that was liberating in a way because it made me stop worrying about the toys and start thinking about the picture.

The Century Master is a camera I've had for a long time, longer than the Rolleiflex. The absolute simplicity of it has been wonderful because again, I'm thinking about the image rather than fussing with the toy. It also recently opened up a world of soft-focus images for me because I was able to marry my Kodak 405mm soft-focus portrait lens to it, and I started experimenting with the potential of not so sharp images. I'm loving where it is taking me.
 

Yes, for me it was getting into the Hasselblad 500 V-system. These cameras just feel like an extension of arm and hand, letting you focus 100% on composition. Never hadacamera before ,which was so much fun shooting!
 
Hasselblad. It was transformative because it opened the world of 6x6 square format. In my pre-Hasselblad life I struggled filling the "ears" on my 35mm photos with something meaningful. The square felt like a breath of fresh air. I trim my squares to be 4:3 sometimes, maybe 20% of the time. But the 3:2 ratio of a 35mm negative still doesn't make any sense to my brain. Hasselblad also allowed me to realize how silly it is, having to flip a cameras 90 degrees for a vertical composition.
 
To add to that: Hasselblad. The first camera that felt like a precision tool.
 
Moving from 35mm to Hasselblad, because of the slower tempo, and 12 frames only per film. Slower yes, but better photos, most of the times.
 
Yin(UTC+8) said:
现在，我最常使用的相机是富士GX680iii和基辅60。它们都很笨重，但在我的身上看起来很酷。
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The GX680iii does make one look like a professional! And builds up the arms!

Photography has been a slow progression over decades. The march from the Rollieflex I learned on to view cameras up to 11x14 has been fairly steady.
Going from silver gelatin printing to alt processes was the most transformative...it changed the way I see.
 
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Minox 35 helped me a lot, because it has zone focus, instantaneous shutter, and fits in the pocket. The repetition of using it without being precious about it really helped me focus on the world and not my gear. This is the reverse of the “slow down” that medium format instills—it helped me “speed up.”
 
When I dug out the Russian Horizont panorama camera that I bought in the 1970’s. I had a lot of equipment go as we moved, worked and raised children. The old metal revolving panoramic camera stayed with us. I took it out in 2015 and used it photographing the space between buildings on the Chicago Loop. That eventually led to buying used developing equipment and other medium format cameras. It brought me back to film and printing.
 
I got one of these for my 8th birthday - a pretty good way to start:
 
Yes, the Hasselblad. I don't know exactly why, but the connection has become absolutely physical.
 
Other than the obvious one, my first real camera, nothing really comes to mind. If pressed, I guess I have to mention the Graflex 4x5 Crown Graphic I have had for about 20 years now. It has a well calibrated range finder that liberated me from the tripod. It certainly had a dramatic effect on my whole approach to large format photography for a while. In hindsight, I think that the ability to use the Crown Graphic handheld may have supplied me with the motivation and the desire to continue doing large format much longer than I might have otherwise.
 
When I moved to LF for my personal work, buying a Wista 45DX nearly 40 years ago. I had been using LF for around 10 years before that with a heavy, bulky De Vere whole plate monorail camera with a 5x4 back, not remotely practical for landscape work.

Ian
 
My first 35mm camera was a Voigtlander Vito II which does not have a range finder and one must estimate the distance. I got me to think about the depth of field and how the aperture plays an important part.
 
MattKing said:
I got one of these for my 8th birthday - a pretty good way to start:
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Imperial Savoy. Early 1960s. 620 film. One shutter speed and one aperture. No settings. It would take a book to document my 60 year progression from that camera to a fully automated Minolta Maxxum 7, (not to mention digital and smartphones) and I'm writing it!
 

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Each camera system I've owned caused me to change how I work incrementally, but two of them were transformational:

30 years or so ago I bought a Wisner 4x5 Technical Field. Although I had used a Calumet monorail prior to that, the Wisner encouraged me to really devote myself to mastery of the view camera. This caused me to compose and see things in ways I'd not previously considered.

Fast forward to last year. Although I had owned a IIIf for a really long time, I finally fulfilled my youthful desire to shoot on a Leica M body, first an M2, then an M5, and then an M4. I cannot quite describe the experience. I have certainly shot a mountain of 35mm on Nikon SLRs from Nikkormat through F3. But the Leica is something altogether different. There is something about that silky quiet mechanism, the big viewfinders, and the small lenses that just makes me want to go shoot more. I shoot more in the moment and more enaged with my subject than ever before, thereby teaching me lessons I can apply to the larger formats I shoot.

I always thought the Cult Of Leica was nuts. Now I am among the nuts in the mix, I guess ...
 
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