In November 2018 my wife, our daughter and I took a trip back to my hometown in Sydney, Australia for my brothers wedding. I took a fair few rolls of film and my Zorki 4 sporting an Industar 50, with the goal being to purchase as many thrift store cameras as I could find/afford, and bring bags of cameras home from the motherland.
There’s a lot to be said for practice when it comes to manual focusing cameras. Unfortunately, it’s fair to say that practice is something that I’m completely out of when it comes to focusing manual SLRs. I realised this after scanning a roll that I shot with an Olympus OM10 last weekend, and finding my hit rate to be quite low. But whilst the experience was quite frustrating, it also made me reflect on how we respond to these sorts of failures, and how we too often blame our tools.
In the last 5 years the value of used film cameras has gone through the roof. Demand has increased, supply hasn’t, and the price you need to pay for a lot of popular film cameras is now reflecting that. But for every day that passes, all these cameras are getting older, less reliable and harder, if not impossible, to service – a fact that sometimes seems a little lost in all the excitement!
In this post you will find out why I don’t know the answers to the question “what camera should I buy?”. You WIll also find out why I don’t make specific recommendations for particular cameras, some thoughts around buying your first film camera, what sort of camera might be right for you bearing some of the core principles of photography and how much you want to learn, some details on different types of cameras, and finally some advice around not falling foul of something called GAS.
The concept of GAS is common, not only among photographers, but also among enthusiasts of other leisure activities likes golf, surfing, skiing, playing guitar, etc. to name just a few. While in some ways, looking into the material nature of your hobbies is gratifying in other ways it can be a bottomless pit of despair: “I’m never going to be a real photographer until I get at Leica M6”, “ My pictures look crappy now, but as soon as I get a Zeiss Sonnar they will look amazing”, “Some stupid celebrity uses this camera and it makes their pictures look fantastic”. In other words: You will take better pictures if you only had something you currently don’t…
