I have a plan to go on holiday to Paris with my daughter the year of her 10th birthday. I know exactly which (film) cameras I will bring. I have prepared a gift for my daughter for the trip: A Panasonic Lumix GF2 (rest assured: this is not a spoiler – she is not a regular reader of this blog). It’s a very compact M4/3 system camera with a screen but no viewfinder.
The Instamatic cameras are anachronisms. The bloated cameras are detested plastic garbage these days. The film format they were designed for is not manufactured any more. Did conditions like that ever stop me from using cameras? I’ve chosen these two cameras – Ilford Sportsman C (below) and Konica EE-Matic 260 (above) because I like the way they look – and also in the case of the Konica the fact that it has an advanced exposure system and a rangefinder (accurate focusing). I also like the resulting square format of the photographs.
When the pandemic hit I was in the midst of my first winter working as a postman/mailman/brevbärare/whatever-your-preference. For the first four months, I sat on my bottom, all day, every day, driving like a madman.
Well, not entirely. The madman part is true but I had 90 minutes of not-driving in the morning to sort the mail and load the flimsy boxes full of letters and piles of parcels (of cat litter!?) into the boot. And I sat for almost ten minutes in the not-moving car for lunch at around 1:30 pm. For your information, working hours were 7:30 AM to 4:00-ish PM. No longer the early bird work of yore. At least here in Sweden.
Canon Top Twin & MC Review – Comparing Two Mid-80s Compacts – by Tobias Eriksson
My very first own camera was one of those flat fold-out Kodak 110-format Instamatics. I remember making paper copies from 110 negatives with my father’s old enlarger once I’d started with 35mm at age 19 or so. Many years later I exposed a roll of Lomography B&W film in a Minolta 110 Zoom SLR. It wasn’t the revelation I’d imagined. With the subject of this post falling into my lap this spring, I guess it’s time to explore the format a little more.
