1980. I was not yet 19 and had just started working at the Prai Power Station.
It was there that I met Lee. He was the loud extrovert. I was the opposite He was super confident, I was most times, not. But for some strange reason, we clicked.
Some three years later, he would leave the job. But not before introducing me to the world of photography, SLR, and Olympus cameras.
Something had triggered. Another awakening. The only problem was (and still is) that photography happened to be a bloody expensive enterprise. Especially for one scrapping by on the meagre labourer’s salary. Which simply meant I could not experiment with film as much as I needed to. Every single roll of film was treated like gold.
Over the years, my entire “gear” consisted of an OM1 body, a standard 50mm lens, a 200mm telephoto lens, a flash unit and a remote cable release. It cost me an arm and a leg but lasted a quarter of a century.
The OM1 went everywhere I went. Up Kedah Peak or Gunung Jerai in Kedah, down to the beaches of Penang, up the hills of Cameron Highlands and back down to the rustic small towns in Perak where I kept getting transferred to, international football friendlies at the Merdeka Stadium, weddings and funerals of loved ones, Christmases and New Years, and not least, capturing my son’s growing years in Ipoh, Taiping and Bukit Mertajam.
Unavoidably, towards the end, mechanical issues started cropping up and I had difficulty finding proper service centres. At the same time, the digital cameras were already showing their fangs that change was imminent. It was a matter of time before analog cameras like my Olympus and their equipment would be put to sleep, mostly.
John Denver paints a beautiful tribute to Jacques Cousteau’s pioneering ship, the Calypso. I reproduce it here for my OM1 -
Fast forward 2020. The Olympus OM1 had finally given up its spirit. In its place, I had a Samsung A10s (it's been upgraded to an A50 now) - a very cheap smartphone. You don’t really need a Leica to capture landscapes, street scenes, and nature. Basically, any plain smartphone is able to snap these respectably. Below are some of the images captured by the trusty A10: