These are short (mini) reviews on photography subjects, not reviews of miniature photographs. There is no particular theme aside from “things I acquired to help take photos.”
https://www.nishiryu.us/publications/mini-photography-reviews
I first got a camera roughly 50 years ago, a Yashica TL-Electro. It was a single reflex camera (SLR) that was entirely manual: no autofocus, autoexposure, auto-anything. But it did come with a built-in light meter: if something was underexposed, an arrow would point upward. If it was overexposed, it would point downward. You could manually adjust (or not) the shutter speed or aperture until both arrows were lighted in the viewfinder. If both arrows were lighted, the image was properly balanced.
Of course, this was just the camera’s best guess, and it didn’t work if you were trying to, say, take a photo of a silhouette, or a sunset, or many other circumstances. For some shots, I used a separate light sensor, just to second-guess the camera. This worked well, unless I hadn’t changed the batteries in the light sensor, which happened about as often as I remembered to use it.
A manual camera was a good start for learning about light, exposure, depth of field, and other photo basics. Alas, some of these lessons were slow to master, as the Yashica was film-based, and developing film was both expensive and slow. You might shoot a frame in March, and not finish the roll and develop it until June. By then, you often had no idea what you were trying to do, or how the camera was set, or why the camera seems focused on a parking sign rather than the motorcycle in front of it.
Things are easier now. Sometimes.
