Once upon a time I only had 4 film cameras, but then...
Until recently the only analogue cameras I owned were my Praktica Nova 1, an Olympus Trip 35, an Olympus mju-1 and my dad’s vintage Mayfair box camera. All, apart from the mju-1, have been with me for over 40 years and until recently have remained largely unused for the last 30 or so. Then, after posting a few photographs I made using the Trip 35 on Twitter (as it used to be known), I began following the #believeinfilm community and in a short time felt the ‘need’ to acquire a better 35mm film camera. Well, this is the story of how I ended up with not just one, but three such cameras!
I should add here that I am not a professional photographer. Any opinions I may have are my own and based on my personal experience as an amateur photographer who has, more recently fallen in love with film photography. I do use digital cameras and my iPhone but the film experience is, at least for me, very different and I'm enjoying it immensely. I should also say that any links to further information are simply that, an attempt to give anyone reading this blog a little more data to go along with what I'm writing about in the hope that it may help others who enjoy making photographs.
And so to the cameras and how I came to own them...
No.1: My camera shop purchase
I found a Canon AE-1 after searching on-line in a Wilkinsons shop in Chester. It looked like the sort of camera that I was after, with through-the-lens metering and enough controls to get the kind of images I wanted, without being overly complex in operation. So I made a trip to the ancient Roman town of Chester to check out this camera. It was in excellent condition and came with a 50mm ‘chrome nose’ lens. The staff were very good and helped me examine the camera and lens. I bought it and thought that would do for me, but then…
No.2 My charity shop purchase
Moving on a few months, I happened to be in St. Helens with my wife. We were just on our way home when I saw a Zenit TTL in the window of a charity shop. I was going to pass by but my wife (bless her) spotted that other items came with the camera as a ‘job-lot’ and knowing my renewed interest in film photography, kindly told me to go in and take a look. I didn’t need telling twice!
The Zenit TTL came with a Helios 44mm kit lens but also a 200mm Meyer-Optik Gorlitz telephoto, a small Velbon chrome-plated tripod and National P182s flash unit. I took a chance on the lot. It was a true bargain as it turned out and far better than I could have hoped for. Both the camera and lenses appeared to be in good condition, just very dirty and dusty. They had clearly remained neglected for a considerable time. A good clean up with lens cleaner, baby wipes and a little Isopropyl Alcohol and a few hours later the camera and lenses looked almost new. With the addition of a suitable button battery I found on-line, the metering system too was in working order.
The beauty of this purchase was the interchangeability of the lenses with my other Russian camera, the Praktica Nova 1 and my wife's old Zenit B - an added bonus!
I was delighted and now had two TTL style cameras to play with. But then things got even better...
No. 3 The unexpected gift
I told a close friend of mine, who works in St. Helens, of my good fortune regarding the charity shop Zenit TTL and a few days later he turned up at my house and handed me a Nikon FE (plus a Nikkor-H.C 50mm and a macro lens). He knew of my growing interest in film cameras and photography – in fact, I had helped him buy a digital camera and flash unit for use in his work a few years ago when he found that he had to move to digital. He had forgotten all about his old second-hand Nikon FE, which had been sitting in a drawer in his office unused since that time. The mention of my charity shop purchase had reminded him of its existence and he wanted me to have it, if I could make use of it.
It was very dusty and in need a good clean up, much like the Zenit – but what a wonderful, kind and totally unexpected gift! Again, after several hours of careful cleaning the camera looked really good as you can see from the picture above.
So, in the space of a few weeks I now had 3 TTL type film cameras. All from around the late 1970s. I figured that I needed to test them all out and so decided to buy 3 rolls of Ilford HP5+ and shoot some photographs in the same locations and in similar light conditions to see if everything was in working order but also to compare both their handling in the field and finally the quality of their output.
In my next post - how the three cameras compared in the field.