Canon Canonet – Kodak Ultramax 400

I got this camera in an eBay lot along with a Minolta Hi-Matic 9, the first camera purchases of my film rediscovery. Both were in beautiful condition with their original leather ever-ready cases, but the shutter wouldn’t fire on the Minolta (long story there). The Canon seemed to be alright, and after I put a cheap roll of Pharmacy Philm™ through it I found that for the most part, it was working. However the light meter and related auto exposure mode (shutter priority) didn’t seem to work, which is to be expected with selenium cell meters (very cool that it once functioned at all without any battery). I downloaded the Lightmate app for iPhone and started learning how to use an “external” light meter for the first time. Unfortunately I later tested and found out that the shutter speeds on the Canon are slow (which again I should have expected). So those unpredictable shutter speeds combined with my novice attempts at metering resulted in a lot of these shots coming out with the wrong exposure. Still, the real issue I ran into was with firing the shutter – I found that sometimes I had to jiggle the lens to get the shutter to fire after I had depressed the trigger, causing me to miss the moment. To top it off, this was the very first roll (along with the roll shot through the Minox 35) that I developed and scanned at home, and I think I made some developing mistakes and also over-handled the film. So in the end I was only happy with these 10 out of 24 shots.

Despite all of the hiccups, when I first pulled that roll of negatives out of the developing tank, I was thrilled. When I got the negatives under my camera and started scanning them in, I was overjoyed. The process was so satisfying, and the tones and gradients and grain that were coming right off the film without any Photoshop or Lightroom edits were exactly the things I had been looking for, the things I had been missing in digital. There was room for improvement, but that’s exactly how it should be at the beginning of anything.

Hit Rate: 10/24 (42%)