Canon 7

Analogue photography is one giant and almost never-ending rabbit hole. You start somewhere, are inspired (or made jealous) by someone else’s gear. You end up scouring online web stores week after week, reading multiple conflicting reviews until you eventually just hit the “buy now” button.

That was my journey with interchangeable rangefinders; my first was a Fed 5b around the middle of 2017 which was quickly replaced by the slightly better built Zorki 4k. I then jumped ship when I got lucky during “garage sale” find with a Contax IIIa but the lens options were pretty limited, and the squinty viewfinder wasn’t very user friendly.

It has often been said that a lot of the great photographers had “their” camera. Capa had his Contax 2, Cartier-Bresson his M3, John Free his Nikon F3 and so forth. That’s not to say they didn’t use other cameras, but it was always something that resonated with me. Personally, I’ve shot 50mm lenses so often that my mind sees in 50mm, and occasionally I see in 35mm, so this notion of having a camera that you know like the back of your hand really intrigued me. I’d like to take you on the journey of finding the camera that I could be happy using consistently and could become “my” camera. A warning, there’s a lot of talk about selling and buying cameras. GAS is real.

I recall as a 16-year old and having taken up photography about a year earlier, seeing in the photographic press the arrival of the Canon 7 with a lens of the simply unheard of aperture for those days, a massive f0.95.  However, thoughts of owning one one day were not on the table.