I was gifted this lovely 60s vintage Canon FX film camera by a very generous Gail Lewis while on a visit to Yea a few weeks ago, and what a little ripper it is. It's absolutely fantastic to be able to get back into fully manual film photography after using digitals for a long time. The whole process forces you to slow down and think about every shot before releasing the shutter because I need to make each frame count. There's a certain aesthetic quality, a look and feel, to photographs produced the old way that you just can't achieve with DSLRs and software. A kind of magic, if you will.
Here's a little photograph I grabbed using the Canon FX and Fujifilm Superia 400 film whilst in Blackwood recently. That's about the size of the main street, a tiny, almost forgotten former gold mining town less than 100 kms away from Melbourne ass the crow flies. Notice the boy in the middle of the road on the bike. I wonder where else in Victoria you could get away with doing that? Yes, I had my fancy pants DSLR and camera kit with me and I could have taken a surgical shot or twenty of the scene but to me the film camera trumped it this time. With the modern cars the photo is firmly of its time, but to me the old film technology adds a sense of timelessness to the scene. Now all I need are some 48mm filters and a few Canon FL lenses and I'll really be in business with it.