The Argus C3 was my first 35mm camera.  It was made by the American company Argus in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and became one of the top-selling cameras in history.

The C3 was constructed primarily of Bakelite plastic and metal castings. The design featured an unusual and simplistic diaphragm shutter built into the camera body, so the camera could make use of interchangeable lenses without the need for a complex focal plane shutter. The rangefinder utilized a separate viewfinder from that of the regular viewfinder and was coupled to the lens through a series of gears located on the outside of the camera body. The profusion of knobs, gears, buttons, levers, and dials on the camera lent it a "scientific" look that was found in customer surveys to be one of the things buyers most liked about the camera.

By virtue of its low price and reputation for rugged durability the Argus C3 managed to outlast most of its American competition and fend off precision German-built cameras and the cheap high quality Japanese cameras that began to enter the American market in the 1950s. But eventually the design simply became too outdated and clumsy and production ended in 1966 after sales had slumped. Interestingly, sales of the C3 had slumped many times during its production life, and each time Argus announced they were going to discontinue the camera, dealers and photographers would rush to buy what they believed to be the last of the cameras, leading Argus to reverse their decision to end production several times.

It has been argued the Argus C3 is responsible for popularizing the use of 35mm film, and considering the long production run and the high number of Argus C3 cameras made, this may very well be true, especially in its native United States.

The next step up in 35mm cameras was my first Nikon, the Nikkormat FT, which was introduced by Nikon in 1967 and eventually discontinued in 1975. This was a basic mechanical SLR camera without any built-in metering capability, made made of die-cast alluminum alloy with 685 component parts mechanically. It was considered as an entry model  into the huge Nikon SLR system.  Used by advanced amateurs and pros as a backup camera, it was able to use all the advanced Nikkor SLR interchangeable lenses.
 

Then came a surprise - the Leicaflex SL camera made by Leitz in Wetzlar, Germany.  When someone dropped their camera down a mountain in Europe, the result was a badly broken camera and lens.  I asked for, and received, the pile of broken parts and took it to Leica to see if it could be repaired.  They actually sent it back to Germany, and subsequently gave me a brand new camera with the original serial number for only a very modest charge.

Although a very fine camera, I was not able to absorb the high cost of additional Leica lenses in my modest camera budget, and wound up trading the Leicaflex for a new Nikon F3HP.

The Nikon F3 was the last in the Nikon series of manual-focus, professional level 35mm SLR cameras. Its production cycle is generally accepted to be from 1980 to 2000 or 2002, close to a record for a high-volume professional camera.  The F3 was also the last F-Series camera to be offered without an integrated motor drive (an optional companion drive was available, but it was huge - see below).  It had manual and semi-automatic exposure control whereby the camera would select the correct shutter speed (aperture priority automation). The Nikon F3 series cameras had the most model variations of any Nikon F camera. It was also the first of numerous Nikon F-series cameras to be styled by Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, and to include a red stripe on the handgrip - a feature that would later become (with variants of stripes and various other shapes) a signature feature of many Nikon cameras.

My last film camera was the Nikon F3HP (High Point) camera, pictured here with its dedicated companion motor drive.  The major advantage of the DE-3 High Eyepoint prism/finder was that the entire viewfinder image could be seen from a distance of 2.5cm from the viewfinder. This made the F3 more usable by those who wear glasses when shooting (like me, when I wasn't wearing contact lenses), or were forced to shoot in high glare situations while wearing sunglasses. The only down-side to this was a smaller image through the viewfinder compared to the standard prism.

Finally, the digital revolution arrived, and with it a series of Nikon digital cameras that improved with each model.  The four digital Nikons that I have used include the D100, D200, D300 and D700, as pictured below: