Armory Additions
Made one or two additions to my imaging armory in the last few months. Don't have time to set up a nice shoot, so you'll have to make do with my terrible "fluro light on desk" shots.
The first is this little number:
Bought off eBay for a song, it's a Canon "Canonet" rangefinder.
Quick history of the Canonet, it was originally released in 1961 and was Canon's first foray into an intermediate market... making it one of the first "prosumer" cameras.
The Canonet takes 35mm film and has a fixed 45mm lens with a coupled rangefinder and "electric eye" selenium light meter. I thought it would make a pretty neat street camera.
Also came with a spiffy ready-case.
The only thing that weirds me out about it is the film-advance lever placement, which is on the bottom. Why Canon did this I've no idea, but it does make the top of the camera look nice and clean.
Unfortunately it's desperately in need of a service as it'd been sitting in the back of someone's cupboard for years. The shutter in particular is really sticky. However, other financial commitments have meant it keeps getting put back. The latest impulse buy didn't help matters either:
I walked into the store to buy film, and walked out with a camera.
This was one of two Rolleiflex SL66 setups that were sitting on their second-hand shelf. Body, 80mm lens, waist-level finder and two backs, warrantied and only half to two-thirds of what a similar setup would cost on eBay.
Now I've been considering getting a medium-format camera for awhile, needless to say I was stoked.
Quick history lesson here too: the SL66 was released in 1966 and continued production in one form or another till 1996. A special edition was also apparently released to the Rollei club in 2002/03. This one's a pretty early one. I've not managed to find a year-by-year set of serial numbers, but reading the start and end I'd hazard a guess this one is late 1960's/early 1970s. If anyone has more info I'd love to hear from you.
Film advance, shutter speed and release are on the right side of the camera.
Focus is controlled by a knob on the left side of the camera and uses a set of bellows.
Couple of cool features on the SL66:
The whole lens assembly can be tilted up or down by 8 degrees, giving it a limited ability to take tilt-shift (as I understand it) style shots.
All the stock lenses for the SL66 can also be reversed (for macro work) without need for an adaptor.
Very nice. I have some 'vintage' cameras as well.
Awesome, out of curiosity, what do you have?
Pentax K1000 and Olympus OM10
Nice get.
Cheers mate...
...I have a nasty habit of buying random vintage stuff from time to time. I dunno, I just kind of like the feel of it. Just the knowledge of something mechanical happening that's been lost a bit in the digital age.
well you can think of it this way, tho items have gotten to the point where they only become more valuable with age. so keep them in good shape and its kinda like you still have the money. =)
Haha... yeah... I keep telling people it's an investment, but no-one seems to believe me. Especially when they see all the money going out for repairs after I applied the same theory to cars ^^;
old school!! sweet stuff.
I want to pick up an old school SLR camera too... full metal body, no electronics, all mechanical. Haven't really put any effort into looking for one though. Jealous of the medium format camera though... took photography in high school and my teacher said we would get a chance to play with his medium format camera. It never happened...
Do so, they're great fun to play with.
If you do go looking for a mechanical SLR, I can reccomend Minolta's XD series. I've been using an XDs as my default shooter for awhile now and it's a good flexible camera... plus the lenses are good and still resonably cheap. It does need a battery to run the light meter though, however it also lets you get a light reading in the lens rather than just ambient light.
nice old school cameras!!!^^,
Wow！Neat!