Cameras, cameras, cameras ... I've been a long time amateur photographer starting with a plastic Diana 120 roll film toy camera back in grade school in the early 1960's. More properly, Kate and I just take a lot of photos, especially travel photos from our adventures captured in this blog. So, let's say that counts as being an amateur photographer. Over the years we have had a lot of different cameras; mostly single lens reflex (SLR) progressing from 35mm film to digital since 2004. But there have been some digressions to other film formats.
Today, July 10, I bought a Nikon F Photomic FTN 35mm film camera on Ebay, pictured above. The camera is vintage circa 1970 -- from the serial number I understand it was made sometime between 7/67 and 9/67 when I was a lad of 15. I thought I'd write a bit about the cameras that we've had, the ones that got away, or that didn't live up to expectations, and try to answer Kate's question: "Why in God's name did you buy that!"
The short answer is the Nikon F (1959-1973) was the first 35mm single lens reflex interchangeable lens system camera that got pretty much everything right. Before that the popular cameras were rangefinders (or boxy point and shoot cameras). The Photomic series (the Photomic T, then Photomic TN and finally Photomic FTN) was the first SLR with a built in light meter, with through the lens metering, coupled to permit open aperture viewing with stopped down shooting. It was the photojournalist camera of choice in those years. It was, and remains, a milestone in photography — a camera I've always wanted to have and hold.
Toy Cameras —
Back to my history .... I've already mentioned the plastic Diana 120 roll film camera which would have been around the early 1960's. I don't know what became of that camera but I did experiment with another one around 1980 when I played with street photography. I recall the Diana was totally manual, you guessed the focus and exposure. It took crappy out of focus pictures and it was expensive, especially for a kid, to buy the film and then have it developed and printed. Over the years there has been an art cult around the "soft focus" effect which is a result of the cheap plastic lens. I never produced any "art" and I never liked the "point, shoot and hope for the best" method. In later years fell in love with SLR photography. The Nikon F Photomic is an historical landmark camera in SLR (Single Lens Reflex) photography. It was the first integration of mechanics and electronics.
My first camera, as an "adult" in the early 1970's, was a Polaroid Swinger Model 20. Again, this was a toy that was expensive to use and produced pretty crappy results. I seem to recall that it used messy roll film that you peeled apart after exposure. Polaroid went out of business (bankrupt in 2001) and, even if I still had the camera, you cannot get instant photography film for it. Kate's parents had a Polaroid SX-70 Model 1 folding camera in the 1980's. It was a lovely camera, we have digitized some of the photos they took, but again it was expensive to use. It's expensive to buy now and I don't think you can find film anymore (actually you can but it's frightfully expensive).
The 35mm SLR Divide —
My first "real" SLR camera was a Praktica SLR, (35mm film, match needle exposure, with the M42 screw lens mount, East German manufacture), which I bought in the late 1970's while working as a Teaching Assistant after my Masters. I can't recall the model designation, it might have been a Praktica LTL. I never had lenses beyond the 50mm lens that came with the camera. I did a bit of black and white photography, not much, but a bit. In grad school, I started a Ph.D. in Philosophy around 1986, there were a number of friends who were "into" photography. They helped to shape my aspirations. I recall my friend Howard who had luckily found an old Leica rangefinder at a garage sale and Neil who had a Canon AT-1 SLR (an modern match needle exposure). There's a contrast there between the collectable (the Leica) and the functional (the Canon). My Praktica was the cheap but serviceable middle ground. I recall that my friend Martin, he's in Germany now, had a Zenit SLR (Soviet manufacture) which was a very similar.
I travelled to England in May of 1979 for a biking holiday staying with Martin and his family. One day, while in London, the camera slipped off my shoulder, fell to the pavement and the prism housing ended up cracked and dented. The camera still worked ... sort of but I ended up replacing the camera body with a Cosina. That was a somewhat better camera manufactured in Japan — but still a screw mount M24 that would use the lens from my now broken Praktica. I can't recall the model designation, it might have been a Cosina CSR (or CSL, or CSM. I didn't hold onto that camera very long.
The Auto-Exposure Divide —
On my return from England, in the fall of 1979, I traded in that screw mount Cosina for a Canon A-1. This was a top of the line interchangeable lens (the FD breach mount) 35mm with built in light meter, Aperture Priority (you set the F-stop), Shutter Priority (you set the shutter speed), manual and program mode (the camera does it all). It was a great camera and a gigantic leap forward in technology. A lot of my punk photography of the early 1980's was taken with this camera. Shortly thereafter I bought a Canon AE-1 Program (Shutter Priority) and accumulated accessories and a few lenses — I recall having a Soligor 135mm/f2, a Canon 35-70/f4 (which I loved), an early Vivitar zoom, a Sigma 16mm fisheye, power winders for both and a Vivitar 285 flash kit. The Canon AE-1 I gave to another niece when technologies changed and I had a Canon 630 (more in a moment). The Canon A-1, with the 35-70/f4, Kate fell in the ocean in the Algarve, Portugal in 1999 and it was ruined. I gave it to my brother Paul who used it as an "objet d'art". It was a great camera, the only thing missing was auto-focus.
Diversion: In the 1980's Kate bought me a Yashica A twin lens — another 120 roll film camera (not the MAT-G with the winding crank; this was pretty basic with a winding nob). The MAT-G had a built in meter, mine was "by guess or by golly" exposures. This was a twin lens camera that might have been popular in the 1950's. I found it awkward to use but do have some images taken with that camera. At that time we had a basement dark room and developed the film ourselves. I seem to recall that when I got bored with it we passed it on to our niece Paula, who was experimenting with photography. Recently I have scanned some images taken with that camera.
The Auto-Focus Divide —
In the late 1980's camera technologies had advanced to include auto-focus. The A-1 and AE-1 where manual focus with automated exposure modes (Program, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority). Kate got me a Canon EOS 630 (it might have been a 620, again I can't recall the model numbers) around 1990 when the camera came out. This camera had autoexposure and autofocus as well as auto film advance. Canon was slow off the mark with auto-focus but this camera worked very well for me throughout the 1990's. Of course this new technology required a new lens mount (for the camera to communicate with and control the lens motors which managed the focus and aperture stop down). The older mechanical FD lens mount was replaced with the all electric EF lens mount. We ended up with several Canon EF lenses: a 50mm/f1.8 (the kit lens which I still use), a 20-35mm/f3.5-4.5 (which I gave to Chris when I moved to the current EF-S cameras), a 28-80mm/f3.5-5.6 and 70-210/f4 zoom.
Diversion: An interesting camera from this era was the Yashica Kyocera Samurai X3.0 35mm Half Frame Film Camera AF (circa 1990). It was an advanced amateur camera with a good zoom range and auto everything. It had an odd shape — most often people would think it was a movie camera. This would produce reasonable prints, I never was happy with the small slides. Unfortunately one day we left it somewhere, probably a restaurant, and didn't even notice it was missing for quite a while. It was an interesting film camera but never became popular.
I upgraded to a Canon EOS A2 in the late 1990's. This was a top of the line camera for Canon with a wickedly fast film advance. I bought a vertical grip which oddly it didn't include any extra batteries. The Canon F1 and F1(new) were professional grade sturdy workhorses at that time but this camera outperformed them in automation. A friend had the A2E which tracked where you were looking in the frame to select the focus point. I didn't go that far! This camera served me very well until 2004 when, on our second trip to Australia, we went digital with the Minolta A1. The last time I shot film would have been in 2005 with this camera. On a trip to Las Vegas and area when we discovered we had left the charger for the Minolta A1 in Cuba.
Diversion: An interesting sideline during the 1990's was the Canon ELPH (1996). This was a very interesting design that did not take off. It was ultra compact, auto-everything, with an unusual film format (APS film is similar to 35mm but smaller). It was drop in film loading and, when exposed, the film canister was the storage device. You never touched the film. At the time digital cameras were becoming more popular and it was often mistaken for one. The Canon EOS A2 and the Canon ELPH where the last film cameras we used. Our digital Canon PowerShot SD1100 (circa 2008) was an 8MP camera with a similar size and shape.
The Digital Divide —
In March of 2003 we made our first trip to Australia via Hawaii when Kate had a conference in Fremantle (a suburb of Perth WA). We were away for a month an shot 35mm film which we transported with us. Shooting a roll or two a day meant that film occupied a lot of luggage space. The next year Kate had a sabbatical leave January-June (2004) to work with colleagues in Australia and she insisted that we were not going to pack that much film. We moved to digital with the purchase of a Minolta Dimage A1 (6MP) in November of 2003 which served us well for several years.
The Minolta DiMage A1 was an interesting camera well suited for travel. It came with a fixed lens (you could not change the lens). Fortunately the effective zoom range (if translated to a 35mm camera) was 28-200mm/f2.8-3.5 so there wasn't much need of another lens. It had a built in flash, a rear viewing screen and an electronic viewfinder. It was auto-everything and even had auto image stabilization. It used Compact Flash memory cards which were quite large physically (the SD cards common now are much smaller) and quite small for storage — this was the period when you'd strip your memory cards onto your computer every night. I was never too keen on the electronic viewfinder, it was quite a compromise from real through the lens viewing. And it was an awful pig for consuming power. The first day in New Zealand the battery went dead on me. I learned to leave the camera powered off when not in use and bought a batty pack grip. The DiMage A2, with a larger image sensor at 8MP came out shortly after I had purchased this camera and not too long after that Minolta went out of the camera business.
In June of 2007, on a trip to Budapest Hungary, digital catastrophe struck. Our DiMage A1 failed and Kate's laptop, where we had been stripping the memory card, had a hard disk failure as well which meant we lost pretty much all of our photos from that trip. I did have the camera repaired but soon after purchased a Canon Rebel XTi (10MP) marking our return to SLR photography and the Canon EF lens mount.
Diversion: We returned from a trip to Cuba with Paul and Judy in March of 2005. Unfortunately we had left the DiMage battery charger behind (we replaced it). Later that month we were in Las Vega and area using the Canon A2 film camera — that would have been the last time shooting film.
The DiMage A1 was a life saver later too. It was used on our 2015 trip to Alaska and the West Coast when our Canon EOS REBEL T4i failed (and was repaired soon after).
During the Pandemic much of our film and print archives were digitized. This is discussed in a Digitizing Photos blog post of 2021. But that reminds me that most of our Wedding Photos (1980) were digitized in 2005 on a Minolta DiMage Scan Dual II. That was a film scanner I had picked up used on Ebay. I used it for several years but it ultimately became obsolete and no longer supported on my workstation.
The digital Canon Rebel XTi, purchased with Airmiles credits, came with a "kit lens" (an EF-S mount 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6), used CF memory cards (like the DiMage) and would accept the same EF lenses from the 35mm film cameras we had — the Canon EOS A2 and Canon EOS 630. The image sensor on this camera, and the serveral Canon Rebels we've had since then, are all "cropped" sensors smaller than the 35mm format. There's a 1.5x magnification (the 18-55mm format translates roughly to a 28-80mm lens on a 35mm camera). EF-S mount lenses are designed to cover the smaller sensor format. EF mount lenses cover the larger 35mm format. They both have exactly the same mechanical format and electronic connections.
Diversion: Canon has always had advanced amateur point and shoot cameras. There are several we've owned and several we still have. A couple of odd ball vanity cameras in this area are the Canon Powershot G10 (14MP) circa 2008 and the Canon Powershot G11 (10MP) circa 2009. These are hardy cameras, really well built, and very much old school with dials to set ISO, shutter speed and exposure compensation. They have a built in zoom lens and are reasonably fast. They're good travel cameras which, at the time, were very expensive. I had lusted over them when they came out but they were out of reach. However, I've bought both in the used market in recent years. The G10 I passed on to a niece when I got the G11 even though the newer camera has a less pixels (10MP vs 14MP).
These days we're using —
These days, since 2019, I'm shooting with a
Canon Rebel T6i (24MP). The 10MP Canon XTi was ruined by night dew one August 2012 when we camped at a Fred Eaglesmith festival. It was replace by a
Canon Rebel T4i (18MP) that we purchased with Airmiles. The T6i I bought used from a fellow on the Facebook Market Place. It came with a 18-135mm/f3.5-5.6 IS (Image Stabilizing) lens which has become my day to day lens. We also have a 10-18mm/f4.5-5.6 IS lens for the wide angle and a 55-250MM F/4-5.6 IS for the extreme telephoto — but the 18-135 is more often than not good enough. Recently we have a 7 Artisans 8mm/f3.5 manual focus fisheye lens for the really wide angle and I've been playing more with flash photography having recognized the grainy effects that result from shooting at extremely high speeds under available light (band shots). We're also using a
Canon GPS device, again a Facebook Marketplace deal, which fits on the flash shoe of the T6i. This adds location data to the EXIF data (date, shutter speed, ISO, F-stop, focal length, etc.) which is helpful.
The Race —
There are a couple of developments we can see in this history. Firstly, there's a history of automation from the mechanical cameras we started on through to the digital cameras of today. That's a history from simple meters, through to automated exposure, then to autofocus and "smart" focus and exposure. All of that has been made possible by the integration of computer chip technology.
Image quality in a digital camera is, in many ways, determined by image size — how many megapixels (MP) are in the image? In the early days 35mm film would produce better images than the digital counterparts. You can see from the above that there has been a race from 5MP cameras on through the years to the 24MP Canon Rebel T6i that we're using today. I see there cameras today with much higher density — the
Canon EOS R5 (a professional grade mirrorless system camera with commensurate pricing) is 45MP and the
Google Pixel 7 cellphone is 50MP!! But how much is enough?
I am more than happy with the cameras we have.
This is a work in progress ....
