The Film Retriever

I am going to echo here something that I have already mentioned elsewhere on my blog. It is always, with a great surprise that I realise that the cameras/lenses that I always avoided, end up becoming my favourite ones. The Zuiko lenses are one of them (the Minoltas being the other ones). These few months that I ended up using the Olympus OM-1n with a couple of Zuikos i fell completely in love with them. Different production stages Now this is something that causes a bit of confusion to me. What i am going to write here is my understanding of what i read on the net. Please email me if you think that something is incorrect and i will try to set it straight. It seems that there are three different production stages with Zuiko lenses: a) The early, silver-nosed ones: Identifiable by the silver colour at the edge of the lens, on the place where you mount the filters. These lenses are single coated and some people on the net tend to avoid them as they ...

I don't know why I always avoided Olympuses. My brother had an OM-10 which was by all means a beautiful camera; it's just that I never got warmed up to them. I had twice the chance to get an OM-1 cheap and twice I shied away. A couple of months ago, a senior gentleman was selling this beauty for £20 on my local car-boot sale, so I went ahead and bought it. He told me that he had bought it in the late 70's and has seen very little use. That must be true, the camera doesn't even display any wear next to the strap lugs and in the battery chamber, there was an original mercury cell, still giving accurate exposure readings. As always, if you want to read everything about the background of this camera and have a comprehensive guide about its different functions and accessories, MIR's website is the place to start. I will limit my review here on my experience shooting a couple of films with it. First of all, I have to say that the OM-1n is a much ...

This beauty of a camera was an unexpected gift from my wife. Found it cheap (£15) and thought that I would be happy to have it. And she was right. The Pentax M-series, was Pentax's answer to the explosive popularity of Olympus' idea to miniaturise cameras in the 70's. The Pentax ME/Super and MX are fantastic cameras to have and the immense popularity of the ME gave rise to a number of different models (ME/Super/ME-F/MV etc...). With the exception of the Pentax 110, the ME and it's bigger brother (the ME-Super) are the smallest SLR cameras produced. Indeed it is diminutive but so well made that it impresses you with it's small size and solid weight. Once you view through it's viewfinder, a nice surprise awaits you. The viewfinder projects such a large image that it is a pleasure to look through. Despite not being the brightest viewfinder around (I love the viewfinder on the Minolta X-700) it has big magnification and it is bright enough. ...

Another car boot sale find, i bought it for the lens actually - i need a Nikon lens for my Nikon F4s so the price of 50 pence sounded right to me and i got the camera with it. The camera comes from the late 70's (1979 to be exact) and it was aimed at the inexperienced photographer who wanted to know nothing about exposure but just focus, point and shoot (although you had to select the aperture). The Nikon EM is a diminutive camera, it took Nikon almost a decade to catch up with the trend first started by the Olympus OM-1 back in 1972. With the EM, Nikon presented their E-series lenses, compact in design to complement the EM, FG, FG-20 etc.. The EM is very straight forward camera to use. You turn the selector to B (for Bulb), M90 for a mechanical back up speed and Auto. The camera is compatible with AI lenses (Automatic Indexing) and has it's own dedicated motor-winder called MD-E.  The first impressions when you pick up this camera are very good. Very com...

A long overdue post about some more lenses i used since the original post found here . I am going to limit the post to the lenses that i currently own and i will not include others that i have owned in the past and sold them. I am basing my scoring on usability, personal preference and - most important- performance for the price.    * Minolta AF 28 f/2.8 I am starting with this lens for an obvious reason. It is by far the best lens of the bunch reviewed here. Excellent flare control and ability to record high detail. Sharp even wide open it is plenty sharp by f/2.8. AF speed on my Minolta 9xi is excellent. It includes a lens hood that is integrated on the lens. I bought this lens for £8 so i am very very happy with it, usually goes for around £80 which i believe it totally deserves it. Some sample pictures here and here . An excellent lens. Score: 9 out of 10 * Tokina 28 f/2.8 SL Another excellent lens that ca...

Another camera that i came across in a car boot sale and bought it for the grand total of £7 including lens and a Canon bag. There are not much to say about this camera really, if you read my review of the original EOS 500 found on this blog , the 500N is an update that adds a blend of features that render the camera more customizable. These include auto-exposure bracketing and selectable AF points, compatibility with high-speed flash and a bit more information on the viewfinder. Exposure system and the AF module is the same on both cameras. Something worth mentioning is that both cameras offer a choice of multi-pattern, centre -weight and partial metering but it is not directly selectable. What happens is, the camera has multi-pattern as default and selects partial (9.5%) when pressing the exposure lock button and centre weight when you swich to metered manual. This is something that the EOS 300V share too. Now, if you have to choose between the 500 and the 500N go...

A charity shop find that i came across about a month ago. As you probably know, i am not a point and shoot camera fan so it was a buy-to-sell buy in order to further fund my passion for cameras.   This camera comes from the early '90s, and it was targeted at the same lucrative sector of the higher-end point and shoot compact cameras. The big mini resulted in good sales and there are a number of different versions depending on whether they have data-back or not and different aesthetics. All of them share the same very nice lens, a 35 f/3.5 consisting of four elements in four groups. There is also an upper Big-Mini F with a 35 f/2.8 lens but it is not that common and it usually fetches a lot more. The camera is a bit on the bigger side and the noise that it makes while switching on and taking the picture is probably the biggest disadvantage. Both my EOS 5 and Dynax 9xi are far more quiet than this little monster. Another thing that left me wond...

I didn't really want this camera. The reason i bought it was the lens - a brand new and clean Tokina 28 f/2.8 that shows no signs of having ever been used. I thought i can mount this lens on my MX and get rid of the Makinon 28 f/2.8 which never really impressed me. Five pounds seemed like a real bargain price so this is how this camera ended up in my hands. The P30T is the third and final incarnation of the first P30 introduced back in the 1985. The P30 evolved to the P30N and eventually in 1990 Pentax gave some facial lifting to the P30N and added a diagonal split screen and a plastic back, moved the production to China and baptised the P30N into a P30T. While this camera was very well received in the mid-80's, ten years later, it seemed so outdated and lacking important features that other entry level cameras from Nikon/Canon/Minolta were offering for standard that eventually persuaded Pentax to pull the plug somewhere in the late90's (1997 if i recal...

The story of how I got this camera started a couple of years ago and it is quite funny. In a car-boot sale, I came across two books, a 1828 edition of the second volume of " Don Juan " and a 1906 edition of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's " Uncle Bernac ". Having thought that I stroke gold, I bought them for the grand total of £5 both. Unfortunately, they didn't worth much in the second hand book market and I ended up keeping them since they looked nice on my bookshelf. A few weeks ago, one of my colleagues at work told me that she is collecting old books and I told her that she could have a couple of old books that I have at home. She wanted to pay for them but I told her that I am quite happy to swap them with any old film cameras she might have. She said that she has an old camera from the 80's that she bought in order to take pictures of her honey-moon and that she doesn't need it any more.... So this is how this camera ended up i...

Another charity shop find that cost me as little as £5, proves the point that if I am such a lucky guy when it comes to how to spend my lunch money! By the late 50's, the rangefinder design was delivering the goods to all major camera manufacturers. It was easy and simple to implement, the know-how was around for almost 20 years now and people seemed to love the combination of relatively small size and decent optics. This demand in camera manufacturing gave the all-green for almost all camera manufacturers to produce the upper class, high quality rangefinders with fast, fixed lenses. In April 1959, Nikon released the legendary F which challenged the rangefinder design but it wasn't until the mid-sixtes that the professional photographers were persuaded about the virtues of the SLR design. That fast changing environment gave birth to a series of innovations in camera design and Konishiroku Konica did not sit on their hands. With the Auto-S, Konika produced th...