From time to time you meet up with a familiar old friend. One you have known for a long time. One in whom you trust. One with whom you feel comfortable. You pick up your conversation where you left off, as if you had never been apart, totally at ease...
I tripped over one of my Contax G2 electronic rangefinder cameras yesterday, whilst looking for my 60mm macro lens for my Olympus Pen-F, and felt a pang of guilt that I had not used it in an age. Indeed there was a half used roll of Superia Xtra 400 still in it, so out of the bag it came and I was soon reminiscing about all the places we had been and the snaps we had made together and a wave of nostalgia swept over me. I had just met up with an old friend.
I was soon scouting through my old albums to find photographs I had taken on this well loved machine and indeed the small collection of excellent lenses that go with it. It was a timely reminder of the quality of the images you get from the combination of this type of camera system and the good old medium of film.
Hmm... remind me, why do we use digital? Oh yes, convenience and low level light performance and capability and... But there is something about the look of these film based images, sigh! Told you I was getting nostalgic.
Anyway, I decided to use up the film that was already in the camera. Partly to refresh my experience of using a manual rangefinder camera and partly out of curiosity to find out what I already had taken on the first half of the film, it having been so long ago since I last used the camera that I have forgotten what's on there; I am really looking forward to having it processed.
The whole process of taking pictures with this outfit was great fun, now I knew this would be the case but I needed to be reminded just how much fun it would really be; this sent me to my freezer to grab some film stock I had been hoarding and setting it to defrost thoroughly ready for 'fun 2 the sequel'.
Now a film rangefinder camera by its very nature constrains the types of photography you can do, but they do have a mystical quality to them that, within the boundaries of their capabilities, no other camera form can match.Time to reload the camera and go make some photographs. Huge grin on face!