Ok, so there is a downside to using a 40 year old camera, the risk of technical failure gets higher, and that’s what happened to my aged Konica!

As I said in my previous post, the light meter stopped working after just few exposures, but that’s not the big problem, the real problem happened just before loading a second film in the camera. I was testing the shutter without a film and I heard a strange click after which the shutter got completely stuck! Without going into much detail, I took the camera to a shop to get it fixed (in London), and the guy told me it would cost me £75 to get it all cleaned and lubricated… of course I said ‘No thanks!’ 😛

I listed the camera ‘as is’ in ebay and sold it for £10 which is not bad at all 🙂

Few weeks after this incident I had a chance to attend the Wolverhampton Camera Fair, UK’s biggest independent camera fair! It is any camera collector’s heaven! (more about that here (arabic))

I originally was looking for a Canonet Q17, but couldn’t find one, so I got myself a younger Ricoh 500 RF for about £25 (plus £2 for a strap). Of course by younger I mean it is only 30 year old… at least I’m older than her 😛

This time the camera worked very well. I shot and developed 2 films already and the results are just wonderful (you can see some of them at the bottom). The lens on this one is 40mm f/2.8, not as fast as the Konica but it does the job. It is also lighter and smaller with more plastic parts. As for the look, well it may not be as cool as the Konica but it is funkier and more modern looking. Since it is almost as small as the Leica D-Lux 4 I can use it as an everyday camera, it will not strain my nick or bulge my bag.

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Notes:

– ما هو الرينج فايندر؟ موضوع مفصل من جزئين على موقع تصويري

So how do the photos of a 40 year old camera look like?

Lovely I must say 🙂

My dreams of buying a Leica rangefinder camera are set way back at the moment, but I figured that an alternative should be out there somewhere. After all, it is hard to imagine that everyone had a Leica back in the 1960s, right?

I’ve been looking for that alternative for a while, and recently have found not one… but several alternatives, and they all shared the same basic design and look in one way or another. Just like the way all the DSLR and compact groups of today look and operate almost exactly the same, back in the 1960s all the major camera manufactures produced viewfinders of more or less the same style and specifications. It must have been tough on the consumer to chose the right camera back then as it is today.

Canon, Yashica, Minolta and probably other manufacturers had rangefinder cameras similar to the Konica Auto S2 I bought few days ago and received and tested yesterday. It’s a compact-ish automatic-ish almost all metal bodied viewfinder camera which looks so alluring as you can see.

First of all, what is a ‘rangefinder’ camera and does it differ from an SLR camera?

Simply put, with the DSLR you see -almost- exactly what the picture will look like on the film (regarding the framing and focus and sometimes the depth of field) since the same image which will be printed on the film is diverted to your eye through the viewfinder. With a rangefinder camera you look through a totally different hole! what you see is an image “close” to what the film will see. That must be a bad thing, right? Far from it!

SLR (and DSLR) is a wonderful technology, it could be used for almost every kind of photography. Then why would one go back to an ‘older’ technology when we have a newer and better one?

Well, it’s not only nostalgia if you are thinking about it. SLRs are great, but they are not without limitations. First, they are big, heavy and complicated. They have many moving parts which can get jammed or broken. They are expensive and harder to manufacture and maintain. Oh, and they are noisy!

The rangefinder camera is a lot simpler. It basically is a box with a hole! Sure there is some kind of electronics inside the auto ones, but it is still much simpler to make and maintain than an SLR.

And there is the one magical advantage; when you click on he shutter release… the viewfinder does not blink! You just hear a simi-silent.. click!

All of the above advantages made viewfinders the perfect cameras for photojournalists, street photographers and anyone looking for a reliable camera that can assist them with catching fast action as quietly and discreetly as possible!

Those were the main differences between DSLRs and viewfinders, and as you can see those differences were significant… at least until 5 years ago or so.

Today we have lots of alternatives. We have amazing digital compacts, and brand new technologies like the Micro 4/3s. So why go back 40 years in time?

Two main reasons. First, I got my Konica Auto S2 for £13! That’s 6 KD!! And we are not talking about a crappy old plastic camera which produces useless blurry pictures. It is an almost all metal camera with, pay attention, super sharp 45mm f/1.8 lens!! You can’t even rent a lens like that for that price!

And second…. Just look how cool it looks! 😀

And one more cool pic by Athoob:

For me, it’s a cheap way to live the rangefinder experience, and believe me… It’s nothing like anything I have tried before! Yes, it’s mostly psychological, I admit that. I have done some great street photography with my Leica D-Lux 4 and even with the Canon 5D, but when I held the Konica in my hands and walked around Birmingham City Centre streets, ticking here, and ticking there, with my eye actually looking ‘through’ not ‘at’ something… and winding a lever with my thump to assure myself that I just got a picture.. now that is feeling technology can’t evoke!

The result?

You can see it in this gallery:

Half Term Monday

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Notes:

– This post was originally written on 27 Oct 2009
– For the above set I used one cheap Fuji film (I can’t remember which), I think it was an ISO200.
– I only adjusted the contrast a bit and cropped few of the shots digitally.
– I shot the film roll in a couple of hours span and got it developed and scanned while I got a haircut 😀
– The first few shots were taken in TV mode, the rest I exposed manually with the help of an iPhone app called Expositor. Why I switched to manual? Because the light meter stopped working!.. but that’s another story 😛