After months of deliberation, analysis, thinking, and planning, and despite recently purchasing a new high-end digital camera and using it extensively, I recently made a modest investment that I view as a demonstration of my commitment to film photography: I bought a 400-foot (122m) roll of 35mm Kodak Vision3 50D, or what I prefer to call by the name exposed onto the film rebate itself: Eastman 5203. The equivalent of 74 rolls of 36-exposure film, it means I’m going to have a lot of 35mm color photography ahead of me for months, certainly, but likely years to come.
Continue reading…Essay
My Favorite Film Cameras: 2023 (The Evergreen Edition?)
Early in 2022, on a whim, I wrote an article titled, My Favorite Film Cameras: 2022. I’m not sure what, exactly, prompted me to write it, apart from just obsessing over cameras — my passion running over as my collection of cameras continued to grow. Since then, the collection has only continued to grow, although now, in mid-2023, the pace of expansion has slowed nearly to a stop. In part, that’s because I’m focusing more attention on actually using my cameras, but moreover, it’s just getting to the point where I’ve experienced all the cameras I really ever sought to experience. Any remaining in the “yet-to-be-experienced” group are, at this point, simply too expensive to justify buying. This includes any Leica you care to name, a more recent Rolleiflex than the one I already own, a Mamiya 7, a Pentax 67, and maybe a handful of others.
As I thought about updating the list for 2023, the challenge of whittling-down and sorting it to just ten examples became became an impossible task. The more I thought about it, the more clear it became that my “favorites” can easily be segmented by type, and within each, there’s an obvious stratification.
Additionally, it feels like the resulting list isn’t likely to change in the future — hence the phrase in the title, “The Evergreen Edition?”. I did put a question mark at the end because, well, who knows. For the moment, I’ll just call this my 2023 list.
Continue reading…Annual Photo Projects: Benefits, with Commitment Required
If you spend much time in the film photography circles on Flickr or Instagram; spend any time listening to film photography podcasts; or, read your share of film photography blogs, then you’ve no doubt heard of annual photo projects. They go by lots of names: “365” (one shot per day for a year), “52 Rolls” (a roll of film per week for a year) — and I’m sure others as well — generally with the idea that you shoot with a specific camera and/or film regularly throughout the course of a year. Often they start with the new year, and they do indeed fit nicely into a new year’s resolution sort of framing. I decided in mid-May 2021 to jump-in, and managed to sustain the project for a time before I just couldn’t do it any longer. Then I started again on January 1, 2022, and simply couldn’t keep it going. The efforts taught me some things, just not what or where I expected.
Continue reading…My Favorite Film Cameras: 2022
My film camera collection has grown over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic — both as I’ve stopped spending money on things like vacations and shifted those dollars to spending on cameras, and as I’ve gotten into restoring and repairing cameras, which involves buying cheap, derelict cameras with a hope of returning them to service. (Sometimes, as with my Yashica-D, it’s been a massive success, too.) But as my film camera collection has topped 130 examples, I’ve been thinking lately about which ones I shoot, which ones I want to shoot more, and which ones I’d keep if I ever chose to downsize. This article is the result of that thought process; a Top 10 (or so) list of some sort, I guess you could say. And foreseeing that my opinions might shift with time, I’ll just label this as being for 2022.
Continue reading…Film Camera Repair: Observations and Advice
My film camera collection has grown through various approaches. Sometimes it’s lusting after a specific model, and waiting patiently for the perfect example to come-up for sale. Sometimes it’s been seeing something on the shelf of one of my two local brick-and-mortar camera shops, and having it capture my imagination. Other times it’s been seeing a derelict camera in an auction listing and thinking I can restore it myself (often successfully). And still other times it’s been discovering something in an auction lot I wasn’t expecting, and being pleasantly surprised. But no matter how the cameras make their way to me, not all of them work properly, and not all are good candidates for subjecting to my rapidly growing but still amateur-level knowledge of camera repair. That’s where sending a camera to a professional comes into play, and I’ve learned — and continue to learn — a great deal about that exercise. This article captures some of the insights I’ve gleaned from years of sending my film cameras off for some TLC, and the obscene amount of money I’ve spent in the process.
Continue reading…The Curious Case of the Non-Fitting Lens: Kodak Retina Aux Lenses
One of the challenging aspects of collecting and maintaining vintage cameras is the sheer lack of detailed historical technical information available for the vast majority of them. Many of the companies who made all this camera gear are long since gone, and virtually all of them who are still around have shifted their business models, often quite dramatically. That can make it a big challenge to figure-out how to solve weird problems that just shouldn’t be happening to start with. And such as it was for me recently.
Continue reading…The Zone and Scale Focusing Joy of Viewfinder Cameras
When I first started to return to film photography, I sought to shoot with modern, professional gear that I only dreamt of using prior to the advent of digital photography — primarily medium format gear made in the 1990s and later. But when the pandemic started cranking-up, I began to embrace film cameras that not long ago I dismissed as too old and too fussy to bother with. Honestly, it was probably a combination of “retail therapy” and nostalgia for a (theoretically) simpler time that was responsible for driving this, but to my surprise, I discovered that there is both incredible enjoyment (not to mention technical mastery) to be gained from the experience, especially with simple, so-called viewfinder cameras.
Continue reading…Camera Repair: Specialist, or Generalist?
As my camera collection has now reached the point where the cameras can be counted in dozens instead of one at a time, there’s one aspect of old cameras I’ve come to know pretty well: getting them repaired. And recent experiences have driven home a choice we often make when having our older cars repaired too — do I take it to a generalist, or a specialist?
Continue reading…When Your Camera Gear Reveals Its Story
To me, one of the more fascinating aspects of using old film cameras is that it feels like I’m actively touching history. I’ve written about this before regarding my Rolleiflex Automat MX, which was made in 1951 — making it the oldest camera currently in my collection. But when I received a pack of four 4×5 film holders from an eBay seller recently, I was brought into a similar type of reflection, and it all started with two words hand-written on the bottom of the holder: Graveraet Tatler.
Continue reading…Pandemic Distraction Project: Microcosms
Being trapped in the house during a global pandemic, what with stay-at-home orders in-effect, etc., has put a damper on my photographic endeavors. While I could certainly take a film camera along with me during walks, hikes and other permitted outdoor activities (well away from other humans), I decided this past weekend to instead load a roll of Kodak Tri-X in my Rolleiflex SL35 (my favorite 135 camera), set it to push to ISO 1600, put-on one of my heretofore unused extension tubes, and set about finding photographic subjects hidden in plain sight. Microcosms is what I’ve called the surprisingly satisfying results, and this article is the guide to the series.
Continue reading…