Some film, the first EOS body, and a 50mm

The EOS 650

In 1987 a legend entered the chat in the form of the Canon EOS 650. The EOS 650 was the first in Canon’s new EOS system of autofocus cameras complete with a new lens mount, the soon to be ubiquitous EF mount which would be Canon’s main (only?) mount until the release of the Canon RF mount in 2018. So, it was a game changing camera that set the stage for a lot of what would become of the modern camera landscape for the decades that followed, for better and for worse.

I’ve had this little EOS camera kicking around for the last several years. I used to shoot it a lot more frequently back when I lived in Washington but moving to Montana it ended up collecting dust in a drawer in between periods of lending it out to friends who had expressed interest in shooting film. It’s a fantastic first time film camera. Aside from being able to be scooped up online dirt cheap it’s just a super straightforward, bordering on modern shooting experience. It has autofocus, a really great metering system, it autoloads and rewinds the film for you, it can read the DX code so it knows how many shots are on the roll and what the film speed is. It takes a lot of the cumbersome aspects of film out of the equation so you can just shoot. It’s a really great tool in terms of just getting out of the way of letting you shoot freely.

SLRs are cool. I’m not just a Leica snob

While we were in Arizona I shot a lot on my wife’s Fuji X-T10 and I remembered how cool it can be to use an SLR style camera. I like rangefinders, obviously. I’ve talked a little bit about the difference between rangefinders and SLRs before in the past so I ‘m not gonna rehash it here.

And after saying that I am gonna get in what I did find enjoyable about shooting an SLR. I did like the “what you see is what you get” factor and the sense that the SLR kind of experientially sucks you in to the frame in an interesting way vs a rangefinder. A rangefinder tends to feel like you’re just looking at the world the same way you might with your eyes but there are little frame lines in your view, and you just put those frame lines over the thing you want to photograph. The rangefinder feels more “open” for lack of a better term.

Because the SLR has a kind of tunnel-vision effect as you look through the lens it really forces you to focus on the image that you’re assembling in the viewfinder, forces you to pay more attention to details of composition, etc etc.. It’s cool, especially when paired with a 50 like Canon’s wonderful 50/1.8. Which, speaking of that little lens, another gem. Priced at around $125 brand new or even less on the used market it’s an optical wonder. Focus is fast and quiet, it’s more than sharp enough on film and digital alike, it’s nice and compact, there’s a lot to love out of that little 50mm powerhouse. You could do a lot worse than putting together a kit of a used older EOS film camera and a second (or third or fourth) hand 50/1.8.

I’ve also got another ancient piece of Canon tech, a 28-70 f3.5-4.5 zoom lens. I know zoom lenses have the reputation of being a dentist’s tool among more refined photographic circles but it can be nice to use sometimes. I’ve made some great images with that zoom lens and the versatility is hard to knock even if I do lean toward prime purity. Either way, I’ve enjoyed the switch up and look forward to shooting this setup quite a bit more this year.

Film specs, for the nerds

I grabbed a roll of Arista 400 to run through the Canon. I’ve been enjoying the results out of these cheaper stocks like Arista and Kentmere. There is some hit to the quality and consistency of results when compared to the usual suspects like HP5 or Tri-X but it’s a smaller gap than you might imagine. And cheaper film means you can shoot more film, and that’s always a bonus. The Ilfotec HC bath helps a lot too. Such a wonderful developer. Negatives are scanned with a Plustek 8100 and Silverfast and given final tweaks in Lightroom.

(Finally) Walking with an old Leica Elmar

Buckle up, kids. Brendon is talking about lenses…again… I posted a couple weeks ago about the Leica Elmar that I recently picked up. I’ve shot it a handful of times around the house but shortly after purchasing it we ended up leaving for Arizona and I didn’t bring the Leica with me. I actually didn’t bring a real camera at all, just the little H35N. My wife brought her little Fuji X-T10 which I ended up using quite a bit. All this to say that despite being super stoked to have picked up the Elmar (for reasons I’ve talked about ad nauseam elsewhere) I haven’t really taken it out for a proper walk until yesterday afternoon.

We wanted to take advantage of the nice weather on some of our last days off before heading back to work so we grabbed the pup and headed out for a walk in the local state park.

I opted to throw the Elmar on the M262 for ease of not having to develop a roll of film before seeing what the lens output was like, and judging by the rendering on digital I do think it will render beautifully on film as well. The light was pretty harsh, as we didn’t really get out until well in to the mid-day sun. But the characteristically low contrast rendering of the older lens design rendered the light pretty beautifully, especially in black and white. One of the beautiful things that I’ve always admired about old Leica glass is this kind of organic sharpness you get paired with a natural feeling contrast. A lot of modern lens design seems to opt for gobs of micro-contrast to give the appearance of sharpness in a way that can give a kind of “crunchy” rendering, for lack of a better term.

My Zeiss Planar tends to fall in to this latter category of lens design. It is bitingly sharp, like amazingly sharp especially on modern digital sensors. But part of that comes down to insane levels of micro-contrast and it can come across as a little too sharp. Weirdly sharp. Unnaturally sharp. So much so that I sometimes pull back a bit on the clarity/detail sliders in Lightroom to try and take some of the edge off the rendering. No such issue with the Elmar, and I definitely enjoy that. All in all I’m super stoked on how it renders. I remember some of the first few frames I saw off the lens thinking, “Oh my god. This is it. This is the look I remember from my old 50/3.5 Elmar. I’ve been looking for this.”

I will say that comparing the Planar to the Elmar there are some quirks that I’ve found annoying. The collapsible part seems cool on paper but generally ends up feeling cumbersome and annoying. I tend to just leave it out and locked in place the whole time and only collapse it when I need to store the camera. Another little quirk is aperture adjustment. The whole body of the lens rotates when focusing, and the focusing throw is so smooth and the aperture clicks dampened enough that when trying to adjust aperture without the infinity lock engaged, the whole lens just spins. So changing aperture is a matter of locking the infinity lock and then changing aperture. None of these are really dealbreakers, they’re just little hiccups that can sometimes make the lens feel a little clunky. But they’re small prices to pay for the upsides of the lens, IMO.

One of the more substantive annoyances is the propensity of the lens to flare. I tend to shoot like an idiot. That is, I point my camera toward the sun quite a bit, which is a recipe for flare. I understand this, and it is one of the virtues of the Zeiss coatings that it is incredibly resistant to flaring. I’m not completely anti-flare, to be clear. I do think it can work in the right context but it can be a buzzkill when it shows up at inopportune times, and the Elmar can do it from time to time. I’m sure as I shoot it more I’ll figure out how to work with it better and avoid conditions that make it flare up. And in terms of flare it does tend to be a pretty pleasing or easily addressed way of flaring, generally presenting as veiling flare that washes out the images, which is pretty easy to fix in editing.

So, all in all it was pretty nice to finally get out and get a walk with the old Elmar under my belt and from the results, I’m pretty pleased with this old hunk of brass and glass. It feels good to have an old Elmar in the lineup again.

Wild West Simulacrum: Vulture City Ghost Town

While on vacation down in Arizona my wife had the great idea to check out one of the local ghost towns about an hour North of where we were staying with her parents. The place we went is the site of the old Vulture Mine and what came through history to be known as Vulture City, an old mine and settlement in Maricopa County about 70 miles outside of Phoenix.

The mine began in 1863 and eventually the small township that amassed around the mine was home to 5,000 people in the early 1900s. The mine was in operation until 1942 and was the most productive gold mine in Arizona history.

The current state of Vulture City is one of both authenticity and facsimile. There are quite a few original buildings, structures, and heavy machinery from the original time period. But there has also been some restoration and an attempt to kind of flesh out and make more alive the remains of the old settlement.

All in all it is pretty well done, judging by the fact that it’s pretty easy to lose yourself in the experience of the place and forget that it is in some sense a kind of reproduction of a time and place, but one in the Baudrillardian sense of a reproduction without an original. Enough of the sense of the place and the history is able to come through the reproduction for it to still be an interesting and enjoyable experience.

I do suspect that part of this is necessary. For anything to exist in the world we’ve built it needs to produce a profit. To be unprofitable is to be condemned to the dustbin of history under capitalism. Kitschification is a necessary evil, and the masses would probably be none too titillated by some empty old buildings even if their stark and unadorned presence is more honest. But I think Vulture City strikes an interesting balance. So if you’re ever around Phoenix and feel like a nice drive to the middle of nowhere to look at some old stuff, check it out.