(Image from Wikipedia; Author=Kieran Turner; Permission=CC-BY-SA-3.0)

After ten years, lugging the Practika around got a bit much, and I was finally able to achieve my long-held ambition of owning a Pentax. The trigger for this was getting married, and so when my fiancée asked me what I’d like for a wedding present I didn’t hesitate. As a result, we headed off on our honeymoon with me clutching a bag of assorted duty-free camera bits to occupy me on the flight.

The Super A was Pentax’s top amateur camera of its day. Small and lightweight (no motors for film-winding here) it had automatic exposure, a first for me. You could select manual, aperture priority, shutter priority, or this new program exposure mode. This is commonplace enough now, but was quite new at the time. It also had provision for dedicated automatic flash exposure. This was another first for me, no more mental arithmetic with guide numbers, distances, and apertures.

I thoroughly enjoyed the facility of the Super A for eight years, until I took a business trip to the USA. Unfortunately, my departure through Los Angeles International Airport coincided with the rioting and curfews associated with the Rodney King incident, and in the flurry of a mad dash through deserted streets by a terrified mini-cab driver, I left the camera on the back seat. Worse than that, the film it contained was almost fully exposed! (That’s why the picture comes from Wiki!)