My first camera was a Miranda that I bought from my friend Gary
SEE: http://www.pbase.com/venicepix/image/46546085
Miranda had already gone out of business and I was lucky to find a telephoto lens and extender, though the Miranda lens mount made them useless for any other camera. The shutter had a mind of it's own and would often hang up halfway across the frame exposing the picture unequally. I also didn't use a light meter. I simply guessed the exposure using the little suggestions that came in the film boxes.
Thank god for the computer photo-image programs that have helped me fix all the errors that it(and I ) made.
A certain curly-haired rascal broke into my house and stole it. He sold it to Chas who worked at the St. Charles liquor store and Chas unwittingly tried to sell it to me! Poor guy... by the time he got it the poor camera was so broken-down as to be worse than worthless... I had loved that camera, but I really didn't want it back!
Next I got a used Pentax Spotmatic, which was one of the first through-the-lens metered cameras. There was a little needle on the viewer and you changed the aperture or shutter speed until it came to the middle. It was a classic camera and I wish I still had it, but it stopped working and it didn't seem worth it at the time to try to get it fixed. I replaced it with a Pentax ME and at least this time I was able to continue to use my lenses.The ME was sort of like an electronic Spotmatic, with little colored lights replacing the needle. When I first bought it I had a little panic attack because it's exposure seemed too automatic, but it turned out that you could push little buttons and over or under expose by a few stops and in extreme cases you could fool it by 'lying' to it about the actual ISO of the film. After a while those little lights became second nature, so much so that I almost forgot how it worked.... it just did.
When that first ME broke down I bought another and when that broke down I got another still, which was the one I had when I left Venice. I always had a camera with me and they showed it. The 'stainless' parts all got green and corroded, the bodies and lenses dented and misshapen. The strap eyes would pull out of the sides, the lenses would screech when you turned them from all the sand, and it took a lot of gaffer's tape would keep the backs closed and lightproof ( more about gaffer's tape in another comment). Needless to say, lens caps and me don't get along. Check out this pic of Dan Clemmens with a strange spot on his hoodie. It's actually a little bug which must have been crawling across the film inside the camera! http://www.pbase.com/venicepix/image/49397492