But I understood that rangefinders with the patch (not where the whole image plane is moving like the fixed lens rangefinders) were the one for me. This one thing was enough to put me off the camera. It was almost the perfect camera, but it had one major Achilles heel: the cluttered viewfinder! All the framelines are on display at the same time. I took it with me on a trip to Montreal and I shot it a fair bit. Until my friend lent me his Canon P that he was about to sell. Besides, having used fixed lens rangefinders like the Yashica Electro or Canonet, I didn’t think rangefinders were for me. I never understood why anyone would pay thousands of dollars for one other than the fact that many famous photographers used them and they’re kind of rare.
#CONTAX G2 VS LEICA M6 SERIES#
I’ve always heard of more expensive cameras, of course, like the Contax G series, or the Hasselblad 500 series and of course, the Leica M rangefinders. Both of them seem to hover around $300 these days. I tried the Pentax MX, Canon EOS 3, Canonet, Yashicamat, Nikon F2, Olympus Stylus, etc, the list goes on.Īt this point the most expensive camera I’ve tried had been the EOS 3 and the Nikon F100, both contemporaries and basically the same cameras. I got a Canon AE-1, which was just ok but didn’t get me excited to shoot with its shutter priority function and loud mirror. But things started to break on a whim, annoyingly enough for me. I got my own a few months later, along with a Nikkor 35m f/2 and used that combo for a year, taking it everywhere with me. I borrowed a friend’s Nikon FE for a week, and the smooth film winder got me hooked. Part 1: My own discovery of analog cameras and the pursuit of finding the camera for me. So over a period of just 4-5 years, I bought and sold quite a few cameras in my quest to find the perfect camera for me. That’s when I started reading more about other cameras and finding myself focusing more on the tangible aspects of the cameras themselves, like the way they feel in my hand, the operation of them and of course, the lenses they have to offer. Those cameras were fine, but they were nothing special. While the EOS 500 has autofocus and program functions, the FTb had a broken meter and was completely manual. Thinking back now, I suspect that it was likely stolen as I found a roll of film still loaded in it, but my naive younger self did not consider this at the time.įor two years, I switched between those two cameras, as a way to get myself used to the incredibly different styles of shooting those two cameras require. A part of me did crave for something a bit more old school and manual, and that craving was fulfilled when I impulsively bought a Canon FTb off a man on the street for $40. It was a perfectly fine camera, as it provided me with many of the modern amenities that modern day digital cameras do, except of course, it shoots film. When I first started doing film photography seriously many years ago, I started it with my dad’s old Canon EOS 500 (or Rebel XS to you North Americans).