I was thinking of buying yet another film camera the other day, this one a Leica Minolta CL. I’ll be honest, I love old rangefinders and film photography. Way back when, in my second collegiate attempt, or perhaps really my third, I took photography and loved it.
It was a traditional photography class because no one had a digital camera back in those days. They existed, but this was around 1989 or 1990, right around the time the first digital camera went on the market. You can read a little about it here.
So we used film. Indeed, for a while I even made a few bucks from shooting, developing in my own bathroom, then printing at the shared student union darkroom at the local U.
Back to that Minolta. As much as I’d like it, I own a bunch of film cameras in varying states of disrepair and, frankly, spending $1000 on a fifty year old body and lens for something I’ll use sparingly is…you get the point.
And, to top it off…I can just go grab some of the cameras I have in storage and use those. Darn it all…that’s just too easy and yes, that’s what I’m off to do right after work instead of writing like I should. Sigh.
Here’s a shot I tool some time back with one or another of my film cameras, probably a Yashica or Nikon.
Slower, cheaper, less useful…