On a Roll with Devin

The Canon Sure Shot Owl occupies a special place in my heart, though not in my camera bag. I am pretty sure the Owl was one of two cameras I remember from my childhood, the other being a Kodak Ektralite that was given to me when my mother bought the Owl. Canon point and shoots from this era are surprisingly interchangeable but I'm sure the Owl was the one we had, as opposed to one of the innumerable Snappys that looked roughly the same. The Owl became her main camera, and I got the little Kodak, though of course my access to film was limited due to the rapidly declining popularity of the 110 format. It is possible that this camera is partially responsible for my love of photography today.

It’s also not very good.

It was kind of a heartbreaker to get my first roll back from shooting with the Owl only to discover it didn’t do anything all that well. It was like finding out your best friend from elementary school grew up to become someone terrible. You may have fond memories, but you begin to question if they were even real. Maybe the camera was never actually good. To be honest, I was a little kid, I probably didn’t take particularly good pictures at that point, and I don’t think there’s much high art in the family’s albums. Maybe it was always bad?

Maybe I used bad film, I told myself, since I tested it with a roll of expired stuff I found at a thrift store - obviously the best choice in film. This roll, the Sure Shot Owl will have a fighting chance. This roll will be different. This roll I’m also shooting in black and white, because I’ve found shots from this camera to have a rather harsh look to them, whether in my own experience or looking back through the family album, and black and white tends to work well with a degree of harshness. In fact, I picked Kodak 400TX, because it’s famously high contrast and I think that might actually work pretty well with the camera’s flaws. Let it be known that I’m giving this camera every opportunity to impress me.

It’s not like this was the flagship of any line. The lens is a tolerable 35mm at f/4.5 - so not especially fast or interesting there. It has a huge viewfinder and makes a fairly satisfying clicking noise once it focuses. Buttons are made of rubber so naturally all of them have chunks ripped out as though a baby tried to eat it. It’s Canon, so it’s well made, but it also feels as though it was designed in a lunch break while designers worked on a more interesting camera. It’s like how Pininfarina, the people who design Ferraris, also designed the Chevrolet Lacetti sedan. It’s clear which project they spent the most time on.

It also has a date back, but I will never use one of those so this feature is irrelevant to me.

The second roll just kind of confirmed the results of the first. Better film, but it still trended towards over-exposure - a Canon habit to this day, going by the habits of my dslr - the auto focus, clicky or not, wasn't completely reliable - explaining my parents always telling people to take a second shot just in case - and the results were overall pretty uninspiring. I did discover I definitely liked Tri-X more than T-Max but the camera itself was more functional than inspiring.

It’s just not, well, good. It also has a fondness for over-exposure, which is definitely a Canon thing, and is probably the safer option for applications that aren’t particularly demanding, but it does result in some relatively washed out images where another camera would make something a bit better looking. Since it’s a point and shoot, it’s not really possible to compensate for this irritating behavior either. I enjoy shooting with a simple point and shoot because you have to focus on other things and overcome the limitations of the camera you’re using, but I found that I wasn’t a big fan of this particular camera’s designed-in limitations. That, and the lens wasn’t especially sharp and nothing else about it was all that impressive anyway.

Unlike other cameras which I found uninspiring, I can't say I have the heart to get rid of the Sure Shot Owl. It just reminds me of a happy childhood, even if I'm not that enamored with the pictures it took.

Up next: More disappointment

Someone at Kodak became obsessed with hinges when they were developing the Cameo. Take, for example, the needlessly complicated rewind crank. It folds into itself to make itself nearly flush with the camera body. It’s beautiful, or would be beautiful if it wasn’t made of 1990s plastic, but it doesn’t have to be nearly as complicated as it is to work. The front of the camera is also surprisingly complex. It’s a two part hinge that also pushes the lens outward. I don’t know if it necessarily had to be, but it is at least fun to play with.

Complicated folding aside, this is as simple as cameras get. You can set the ISO at either 100/200 (it’s the same setting) or 400, which changes the aperture. You can turn the flash on or off. You can take pictures and wind film. That’s it. It’s fixed focus, it doesn’t bother you telling any of its specs because, honestly, what are you going to do with that information?

I wish Kodak put as much care into the color selection as they did into the many hinges. Because as fun as this camera can be, it has a big flaw baked into the design - this is one dreary looking bar of soap. It’s entirely due to the plastic it uses, molded as it is in depression grey with equally depressing accents. There’s no reason for it to be this drab, Kodak could have made it in any color they wanted! If it was in another color, one might remark that it’s comfortable in the hand and has some fairly pleasing accent lines. It’s a theoretically pleasing piece of industrial design let down by the terrible materials they chose to render it in.

Maybe that’s why, in spite of it being in my camera bag a lot, I rarely actually shot with it. That, or the viewfinder, which is tiny and nearly useless. These are both reasonable explanations for my preference for other cameras.

Continuing my pattern of never actually using Kodak film in Kodak-made cameras, this roll was Fujifilm Business 400, which I bought because of its appealingly basic packaging - white and covered in green Japanese writing - and am using because I want to alternate color and black and white and the majority of my color film was made by Kodak.

I found that I had more camera shake than I expected, which I initially just blamed on a slower than needed shutter speed, but as I thought about it I realized there was a camera issue at play. It's possible that I didn't have a very steady hand, but it's also partially the fault of the camera design. The shutter release is flush with the top of the camera, which makes it easy to get a bit of shake when you press it, if it was less flush it might actually work better.

The above image is pretty much “every possible flaw with a shot taken with the Kodak Cameo” It’s shaky, it has inconsistent sharpness, the cheap plastic lens deals with lens flares quite poorly. That it’s kind of poorly framed is on me, however.

But otherwise it's actually pretty good. The lens is clear and just a touch unpredictable, enough to give the images a bit of entertaining texture. The roll used for this project was mostly used on architecture - at the University of Regina - and it did make the buildings look good while making the trees surrounding them have a bit of personality. The Fuji film is probably meant for this kind of thing, and combined with a cheap camera it looked right and natural. In spite of some disappointment as the roll went through, I found myself growing fond of the results.

It feels a bit like first priority was to be clever, and second priority was to make a camera. It’s more fun to play with the hinges than shoot with it, and some of the design choices conspire against you. But it follows Kodak’s philosophy of making something that's fun that might keep people buying film, even if you might want to shoot everything twice to ensure you have the shot.

If you've got a steady hand you can get a good photo out of it, so if you find one in your basement don't be afraid to throw a roll of film in there and see what happens.

Up next: My childhood?

(Note, always remember to clean your scanner)

The Pentax Espio 80V was boring. It was very boring, in fact. But it has never made me bleed, so it is automatically a better camera than this one.

What is this camera? It is mysterious. We know it was made in China, because of a sticker, and we know it passed quality control somewhere, due to a second sticker. It is bright green and has a tiger on it, so it was designed for children. The design is vaguely similar to some basic cameras Vivitar was doing at the time - specifically the Vivitar Eco 35, which also used a round winder coupled with a triangle-shaped shutter release - but having spent some time with an Eco 35 in a charity shop I can confirm that camera never worked quite so poorly.

Let’s go over the features. The tiger molded on the front is designed to ensure your fingers always cover the lens - the first roll I shot with it, most of the images had a stray finger in the shot, and I have average-sized hands. The film door doesn’t close properly because the latch has warped, due to being made out of the cheapest plastic possible. The winding wheel feels like it is broken at all times. The rewind wheel requires a key that disappeared on the way to Value Village so you have to improvise, and the sharp edges may lead to cuts. At the very least, it definitely cut me. There are no settings apart from a flash that doesn’t work anyway. Shooting with it is a miserable experience for everyone involved. And due to its myriad of flaws you can actually get kind of good photographs out of it. It’s somehow the worst camera ever made and the only one I own that has paid for itself so far. How does that work?

Since I committed to shooting a roll with every working camera I own, I had to figure out what to shoot with it. Since you can’t change settings, it was clear that I had to use something relatively slow, rated at 100 or 200 ISO. The first roll I shot was Agfa Vista 200 (which is apparently Fujicolor C200 in a red box), which played well with the camera, but I was out of it and had to look at alternatives. I had five options as a result. One, Kodak Ektar 100, immediately discounted because that film’s actually good and worth money, and thus not a great choice for a camera that is neither of those things. Two, Kodak ColorPlus 200, was cheap enough, and a sensible choice if I’m going to go color. I also had a roll of Kodak ProImage 100, which I’m not a huge fan of anyway - the colors are very muted and not quite my style. I had a roll of Lucky SHD 100 lying around, and a roll of FomaPan 100 as well. Since it’s kind of fun to alternate between color and black and white, and since FomaPan was eaten last time I used it in the Kodak EasyLoad, I thought it would be fun to go with that.

I apologize to the fine folks at Foma for consistently putting their film in terrible cameras. I also used a roll in a good one once!

I knew it was bad already, but to my amazement the camera somehow got worse since the last time I used it. Specifically, the latch for the film door warped. It already worked poorly, but now it would not latch on the top part of the film door at all. This, as you may imagine, was a problem. And in trying to latch it I managed to break a nail, making this the second time the tiger camera has actually injured me. Eventually, through an elaborate operation involving a sewing needle, I managed to get the film door closed.

It injured me twice already and everything is difficult. This was made for kids, remember, possibly to aid their problem solving skills.

The camera does have a distinctive milkiness to it. It's mostly over exposed in the middle, with some vignetting around the edges and the occasional thumb in frame. It's distinctive, and in the right environment it can actually work, but it mostly doesn't. The lens is fixed focus, of course but I haven't quite been able to figure out how far back you need to be, apart from further than you expect. It also works better with colour film, mostly because that milkiness needs something to cut it. Which is not to say that going black and white doesn't work, and my trusty Fomapan tried it's best, but when you're working with the worst camera in the world you can't expect things to go smoothly.

It also seems to be blurry in the middle no matter what, possibly because the lens is cheap and kind of terrible. So for best results you have to shoot with a dead area in the middle, or possibly just something that could work with a blurry middle. Also, in spite of clearly being designed for outdoor use, it is utterly baffled by bright sunlight, even though I was using 100 speed film I was getting hilariously overexposed on images taken on a lovely summer day, though it seemed to be something to do with the terrible plastic lens doing something weird in the bright light. Maybe the FomaPan doesn't react well to getting over-exposed - still looked good in relatively low light, but the brighter images were a mess - but it did fail in an interesting way.

If you want a camera that constantly feels like you’ve just broken something, use the tiger camera. Winding the film causes the most horrifying mix of cracking and snapping noises. It seems to flex a bit as you use it, because the materials are cheap and horrible. It’s really uncomfortable to hold, because the people who designed it were monsters.

Up next: Something cheap that doesn’t actively hate you.

The Pentax Espio 80V is boring. It looks boring, with a weird bump on the front that makes it appear as though the designer forgot to include everything the camera needed and had to fix it at the last minute. It’s rendered in dismal grey plastic, a lump of ‘90s soap bar sadness. It’s a zoom point and shoot, with a range from 38mm to 80mm, which isn’t an especially amazing range. It has a date back, but I hate those. It has a flash that turns off and on. It keeps track of exposures via an LCD, which is at least fairly big and easy to read. The viewfinder feels like something you would find on a fixed focus camera from a 1990s gas station. Buttons are rubbery and feel unpleasant. The viewfinder has distortion at the edges, which seems like a problem solved by literally every other camera, including some of the bad ones. It’s lumpy and boring. The plain porridge of cameras.

It isn’t consistent, sometimes putting out a perfectly focused image and sometimes giving you a blurry mess, even if the man behind the camera isn’t doing anything all that different between scenes. It rounds out to being roughly average. I’m also slightly annoyed that it uses a Cr123a battery, since they’re more expensive but since the camera is big and chunky it’s not taking advantage of the size benefits of using the little battery. When I put it on the shelf beside a contemporary Olympus I can’t help but wonder what they were doing with this body.

I'm being cruel to the poor, uninspiring little thing. Not everything about it is awful. The zoom toggle is quite nice, a really satisfying little rocker switch that you don't realize is special until you use other, inferior solutions. It is pretty chunky which makes it easy to hold. It's also basically reliable.

There are plenty of worse cameras out there, I own several myself, but that's sort of the problem. It's at this weird crossroad where it's not bad enough to be interesting but not good enough to be actually good. It's just kind of in the middle, thoroughly average and unremarkable. The primary flaw with the design is that it was coming at the last great explosion of point and shoot cameras, when most people were really pushing the envelope with what the category could do, and they’re often pretty fun to shoot with. This Pentax isn’t, instead it’s just pretty boring, with no standout features and a terrible viewfinder. It’s not a camera that makes you want to pick it up and have a bit of fun.

I loaded it up with Lomography Color 400. I went with Lomography today because of their motto, don’t think, just shoot. I don’t want to think about my miserable little Pentax, I just want to shoot with it. As an added bonus, I haven’t actually used this film before, so I’m really curious what the film actually looks like. I could have picked a more auspicious debut for Lomography’s film in my life, but if it looks good here it looks good anywhere.

And it DOES look good here. It is not that much fun to shoot with the 80V, but the results here, combined with the Lomography film, are superb.

It's the colours that do it, superb, bright, accurate colours, making my small town look like a beautiful little place. The exposures here were absolutely superb in color, and some of the images were also pretty good. It did redeem the little Pentax, because instead of just being a dismal little camera it's a camera that can, when loaded with the right film, do something quite special.

I’m hard on the Pentax, but really the problem is that I’m a collector with an absurd number of cameras on my shelf, why would I ever pick up this one? If you find it in your basement, it’s still worth a roll. If you find it in a thrift store, honestly, you can probably skip it.

I still don't like the camera, but I think I'm going to shoot with this film forever.

Like my photos? Visit devin-wilger.pixels.com.

Up next: Oh no.

What we have here is the end of an era. The Canon A35F was the last Canon rangefinder. A legacy that had gone on for decades ended with this model. Soon after, they would release their first point and shoot, known as the Sure Shot, Autoboy or AF35 (for maximum consumer confusion) depending on where you lived. As consumers would go on to embrace auto-focus point and shoots, the humble rangefinder would soon disappear, until hipster weirdos rediscovered them and how fun they are.

In spite of knowing that they had a revolution coming down the pipes, the fine folks at Canon didn’t exactly phone in the A35F. They could have, it was a bit of a stop-gap model in the grand scheme of things, but instead they took their old rangefinder body and did something interesting, they put a flash in there. Hence the big F on the front of it.

This sounds simple, and it probably could have been if it wasn’t Canon, who decided that the best way to put a flash in a rangefinder was to repackage the whole thing around it. This might look like a black Canonet 28, but they had to completely redo the inside of the camera in order to put a pop-up flash in there. They had to design a new film winder that didn’t move when the film advanced and tucked out of the way so it didn’t block the flash popping up. The light meter shows you the aperture rather than shutter speed, since flashes typically use the same shutter speed most of the time. The film door is shorter because it can’t wrap around the side - that would expose the flash and battery compartment - and it doesn’t open by pulling up the winder like in the older model likely due to the way the hinge is packaged. Everything here is packaged around the flash. It is extremely proud of the flash - look at that big yellow F - and very concerned with hiding it away. It’s as though Canon engineers wanted you to know they didn’t half-ass this by just gluing a flash to the top of the camera and calling it a day, this wasn’t a mere stop-gap but a product that required some real engineering and packaging skill.

Yet if you’re used to a Canonet 28, you’re right at home. Everything is roughly in the same place, it still uses the same awful battery - though it requires an additional battery solely to fire the flash - and basic operation is roughly identical. Mine has the fun quirk of having a slightly misaligned rangefinder, which makes it a bit more difficult to use, but that’s not so much a design flaw as it is a reality of a camera that probably had a few bumps along the line over its 35 years in existence. It does feel cheaper than the older model, more plastic and less metal. The new compact film winder is slightly less comfortable to use, the small knob not being especially great to grip. It does still feel special though, and at the time Canon was very good at making their cameras feel special.

For film I used a roll of Lucky SHD 100, a black and white film from China. I don’t actually like Lucky film very much, having used it a couple times before and never being a particularly big fan of the results. It has fans - I bought it because someone on the internet was a Lucky superfan who said it was the only thing he ever shot - though I was not among them. But I still have some and I didn’t want to waste it, so in it went.

I discovered something about the Lucky film I didn't realize because this is the first time I had to scan it: there are no edge markings. This is a problem for one very important reason, you need those so you can tell how to load the film into the scanner. It's easy to fix when the image is mirrored, but I shouldn't have to do that, because I should be able to just load it in using the edge markings as a guide. It also seems to be surprisingly fragile. It is very cheap film and while it's going to show up here exactly one more time, I am going to use that last roll in what I feel is an appropriate place.

My issues with Lucky aside, the result was about what you would expect from a Canon rangefinder - very good. In spite of the imperfect rangefinder, it was still easy to focus with, which is the important thing. Images were sharp, nicely exposed and of a high standard of quality. Canon know what they’re doing, and the A35F is an example of that, it just takes good pictures, even with film I don’t necessarily like. I might complain that it feels cheaper than the earlier Canonet, but it’s still doing the fundamentals right, and they clearly didn’t cut costs on the most important part, the lens.

Next up, fooling around with a merely okay point and shoot.

The most amusing part of the Braun Norca, a folding medium-format camera, is the shutter release. The shutter itself is mounted on the lens, but the release button is on the main body of the camera - and on mine the button’s cover has been lost to the mists of time, leading to it being quite uncomfortably pointy. In order to connect the button to the shutter release, a long bar goes from the body to the lens. This bar can, and does, get lost when the camera is unfolded and you frequently have to unfold it again in order to make sure it’s in the right spot to hit the shutter lever.

That wound up defining the camera for me. It looks like an incredibly advanced - or at least advanced for the era - camera, but it also feels like they didn’t quite get the bugs worked out before selling it to the public. That little metal bar is a solution, but it’s not a good solution, and probably not the solution that they actually wanted before they sold it. It’s similar to how at least part of the view from the viewfinder is always blocked by the lens. Putting the viewfinder on the body is modern and cool, but they didn’t do it quite right. The very dim window to see what exposure you’re on might be a result of cheap plastic and old age conspiring against me, but the end result is the first time I ran film through it I wasted half a roll. It does have a neat little door to prevent you from accidentally getting a light leak in this spot, which is very thoughtful.

Flaws give a camera character, however, and if nothing else this thing has ample character.

What else does it have? It has a 105mm Braun-Praxar lens, which is either at f/8 or f/16 - helpfully labeled with a little cloud or sun, respectively. The most amusing part of this is that f/16 is accomplished by moving a little ring behind the lens to step it down, because complication is not in the recipe here. Macro also is not in the recipe, as the nearest it can focus is eight feet, and you’re going to have to guess if you’re in focus or not. Old cameras were made for people who could tell how far things were apart from each other.

For film I went with Kodak Ektar 100, both because it’s a well liked colour film and because it was the only medium format film I had on me at the time, both excellent reasons for choosing it. Because this camera takes wide images that are also absolutely massive - the negatives are 6x9, and you can get eight shots on a roll, so you use your film up very quickly.

I quickly discovered one very important thing - there was a light leak somewhere. It seemed like it might be a fresh one, given that it didn’t show up early in the roll. Honestly, it’s likely my fault, given that I was using the camera instead of keeping it on a shelf, and this probably made some of the ancient leather crack. That’s unfortunate.

Also unfortunate is that I’m clearly not great at judging distance and, as a result, the focus was frequently very soft. The sheer age of the camera also likely didn’t help in this case - this thing is old - but the result was a very soft focus, as though Susan Lucci was trying to get another Daytime Emmy. The lens wasn’t bad, and if something was in the distance it could be pretty clear, but it’s definitely a flaw and a flaw that is at least partially on me.

The two problems had an unexpected effect of giving a very pleasing image. Honestly, if there’s a shoegaze band out there looking to shoot an album cover, I’ll gladly do it with this camera. The combination of softness and bright squiggly lines makes for the perfect image to sell fuzzy distorted guitars. The many flaws combined wound up making an image that was kind of great all things considered.

These issues were not always a problem, I got an excellent sunset shot of a tree from it as well, which showed what the camera could do under ideal conditions, and when I could just set it to infinity without having to judge where anything was. I want to do more landscapes with this, and not just because it has a massive 6x9 negative. It can do them.

I’m not going to reach for it most of the time, because you have to be extremely aware of its flaws if you want to get a good image out of it, and it's definitely not for every situation. I'm also going to have to find out where that pesky little leak is. But in the right situation, with the right subject and a bit of knowledge about its many flaws, this camera will do something nothing else will.

Next up: Another classic Canon.

Canon’s Canonet 28 was my first working rangefinder, the camera that made me realize that rangefinders are fun and everyone should have one. Found on eBay for about $40, I bought it because it was relatively cheap for a rangefinder, and one from Canon no less. My main digital camera is Canon, I like Canon in general, it felt right to buy a Canon for the first rangefinder I owned. I’m sure everyone in the know has their own ideal first rangefinder, but for me, the Canonet 28 was great, because it was cheap and good.

So what’s a rangefinder? Well, before autofocus point and shoots became all the rage - something Canon also helped with their first Sure Shot, another camera that I adore - you needed a way to tell if you had your subject in focus. Some early cameras would let you just guess, but the rangefinder uses two overlapping images to help you judge whether you’ve got the distance right. In this case, you watch a little yellow bit in the middle of your viewfinder until everything looks right, and it’s very effective unless you’re photographing trees or repetitive patterns.

The Canonet 28 is a really user friendly device. Winding the film is done with a satisfying and comfortable lever, the camera looks and feels like a solid piece of equipment, everything is easy to see and read. It’s a pretty good beginner’s camera, which is what it was intended to be when it was introduced. It has good glass - 40mm, f/2.8 - it’s well put together, and you’re going to get some great shots out of it.

It’s not fully manual though, and if it doesn’t think the shutter speed is in the right range - seen on the right edge of the viewfinder - it’s not going to fire. It is a beginner’s camera, and it’s designed like a beginner’s camera. If you think you know what you’re doing you have to pay for the privilege of proving it, then and now. It doesn’t quite have the range of shutter speeds I would like - specifically, if you’ve got 400 speed film on a sunny day it gets really frustrated with you and your poor planning - but it is otherwise effective. The automatic nature of it does highlight the camera’s biggest flaw, which is the battery.

Back when the camera was made, it used a mercury-based battery, a PX625. Then, years later, when people realized that putting mercury in landfills was probably a bad idea, they went out of production, mostly due to being illegal in most countries. This is a good thing all around, especially if you care about the environment or your health or other stuff like that. The problem is that the battery is a funky shape - it has a raised edge on one half - and everyone involved in making those batteries looked at the mercury ban as an opportunity to stop making batteries in a weird shape.

This may not have been a problem when the camera is made. It is definitely a problem now, and our solution is an odd one. There is a battery that almost fits, a 625. It’s primarily used for hearing aids, and as a result it’s easily available wherever old people are found. It doesn’t have the weird shape though, so if you want it to actually work in your camera, you have to get creative. In my case, that involved finding a rubber o-ring, commonly used for plumbing, and wrapping the battery with that so it stays in the right place in the battery compartment. It’s not a perfect system, sometimes I have to gently tap the battery door if the battery has shifted in the night. But it works well enough, and it means I can keep shooting with my neat little rangefinder, something I enjoy immensely.

The appeal of the format, for me, is that they kind of require you to think a few steps ahead. You’re not actually looking through the lens, unlike a Single Lens Reflex (SLR), but if you know basically what you’re doing you can predict the results pretty well, but there’s a bit of risk taking involved with getting the shot. This is also true on mine, which needs new light seals, which I keep intending to replace except, well, it leaks light in a really endearing way so I’m not sure it’s actually a flaw. It gives the camera a personality, and while I would be taking photos that are technically better if I fixed that, it’s tempting to just not bother and see what wild effects result.

This is why I’m using my Canonet to test some odd film I purchased, Lomography Redscale XR. Lomography, as a company, has a pretty cool philosophy in my mind, encouraging people to just shoot and experiment and not take photography so seriously. It’s all supposed to be fun, and I embrace that message, partially because I can’t afford the really nice stuff, but partially because I like the freedom that comes with embracing flaws and unpredictability. It becomes a conversation between the camera and photographer, a rare art form where an inanimate object becomes a collaborator with its own personality.

They are not a perfect company, however, as they keep charging $60 for the awful Holga Diana, a camera they couldn’t give away with the purchase of tires in the 1960s. They have to keep the lights on, I respect that. And it gives them the chance to sell weird film like Redscale XR, which apparently changes its look depending on how you shoot, as it is rated from 50 to 200 ISO. The more light it gets, the more it changes. Specifically, shoot it like it’s 200 ISO, you’re getting some deep reds, but shoot it like it’s 50 and it gets very yellow. I like it more the more light it gets, going really low ISO gives it a ton of personality and I prefer the yellows to red overall. I’ll be using this film again.

I wanted to see what would result from an experimental film, a slightly leaky rangefinder and a curious photographer who likes taking pictures of nature.

Turns out that it was more than slightly leaky, this thing wore its leaks proudly and prominently. It mostly just confirmed I really need to stop putting off fixing those light seals if I ever want to actually use this thing again. The leaks did look kind of neat when you consider how red the image is normally, however. The blue crossed with the red is a one-of-a-kind look, and it’s not really something you’re going to see deliberately most of the time. It had personality to it, but possibly too much personality. It needs repair, badly, is what I’m saying.

But isn’t that the joy of old things? You can see a problem, and you might know exactly how to fix it, so you devise a plan and a strategy to work on this old, mechanical technology. Instead of looking at it as a “ruined” roll, it’s a roll with personality, with flavor, with flair. It’s something different, maybe not something good, but something that you’re not going to see many other places.

Kodak had an interesting business model. Their film was always excellent, of course, used by professionals around the world. It still is, in fact, though the number of people actually shooting on film has declined dramatically they’re still using Kodak products. It was a film company first and foremost, it existed to make film, sell film, and get people using film.

This naturally lead to the company making cameras as well, because if you sold cameras you could sell people film to use in those cameras. But Kodak’s primary goal was not to sell great cameras, but to sell people film. So the result was that their cameras were not aimed at the professionals who still buy the premium, professional film that parts of Kodak still produce. Kodak was much more interested in the value proposition, making cameras for the everyman, cameras that were simple, cheap and would allow anyone to buy film. Kodak film, specifically.

This lead to Kodak constantly making new formats (with cameras to show them off) and it lead to the camera we are looking at today, Kodak’s EasyLoad 35 KE30, a camera designed to be so simple a child could use it, and then convince their parents to buy Kodak film.

The KE30 is a helicopter parent of cameras. First, you can’t do anything if film isn’t loaded, pressing the shutter release just lights a red light, to remind you to put some film in. Maybe you are just checking to make sure that the shutter on a camera you bought for $2 at Value Village still fires. The KE30 doesn’t care, it needs you to know that this is not going to get you any pictures, and you need to load film to make it work. Alright then, KE30, I’ll give you some film.

Flip around to the back and you find a relatively small film door, because the KE30 is meant to load easy and that means none of that traditional camera back nonsense. Open that door and it declares that this camera uses Kodak film. Because I am a rebel, I decided to use some FomaPan 100, which is not a Kodak film. I slid the end of the film into the tiny slot that is apparently much easier than the traditional method of loading (it’s not) closed the door, and listened as the camera made a loud whirring noise and didn’t actually load my film. It was on to my tricks and did not approve of my attempt to load something that wasn’t by Kodak. How did it know?

Turns out I just didn’t give it enough film to hook on its winding mechanism. Perhaps Kodak films at the time had slightly more film sticking out of the cartridge than other manufacturers. After I figured that out, I loaded a little bit more of the FomaPan into the camera - because I wasn’t going to let the camera win - and observed that this easy loading system was somehow more difficult to use than literally every other film camera I own.

All of this and I haven’t even taken a picture.

It didn’t take very long for me to actually understand the KE30, however, because this is a camera designed for a specific purpose. Specifically, this is a camera for kids. The design, with pleasant curves and a funky oval for the flash, looks welcoming rather than intimidating. Strategically placed squishy plastic makes it comfortable to use. Buttons to turn the flash on and off give the illusion of control, though their use is enough of a pain that you’re also more likely to just let the camera do its thing. Refusing to let you fire the flash without film is to prevent disappointment from kids rather than assert control. The entire EasyLoad system feels like a way to prevent kids from wasting film, which is as much marketing to parents as it is to children. It doesn’t make loading easier but it DOES happen to make it more difficult to accidentally ruin a roll by opening up the back. That it’s not actually written like that makes me wonder if salesmen were instructed to pull parents aside and explain the actual purpose of that particular innovation. It has a cheap-but-durable construction, it doesn’t feel particularly precious and it’s going to take a few bumps, but a kids’ camera is supposed to be able to take a few knocks.

It does happen to be designed to ensure that kids keep buying Kodak film, even after they have grown up and out of the KE30, almost as though it’s designed to convince them of the merits of Kodak film itself. They will eventually grow out of using the KE30 as their main camera, but they might just keep loading up their next cameras with Kodak film. And that’s what Kodak wanted, the entire design philosophy of the camera was to give people a reason to buy Kodak and only Kodak.

It is fixed focus, you need to be at least four feet away from whatever you happen to be photographing. It’s a 29mm Ektanar lens at f/5.6. The kid-focused design may explain why said lens on my KE30 was covered in a residue of sticky crap which often happens when children are involved. It’s very biased towards firing the flash, which feels like a safety measure - “I’ll fire the flash, just in case” the camera says, like a worried mother - but you can override that. The buttons on the front aren’t exactly as handy as having a switch for this same purpose, but it works and prevents accidentally leaving the flash off. The design is very much biased towards ensuring you don’t do anything accidentally, which is precisely why I forgot to turn it off and accidentally got a shot of the inside of my camera bag. You can’t beat me, KE30!

Shooting a roll was as fun as you can expect from a fairly basic point and shoot. And then I got to the end of the roll, and the camera did not forget that I loaded it with film that was not made by Kodak, and it did not forgive. Rewinding went fine, until the end of the roll, when it decided that no, it would not relinquish my roll, I had to learn a lesson for not abiding by the rules. There is a lock on the film door to ensure you don’t release it by accident. It would not unlock. It stayed firmly locked, to teach me a lesson for daring to use a non-Kodak film. It would rewind for hours, but it wasn’t going to give up my roll. It did not approve of me daring to do the unthinkable, loading it with film that was not Kodak. “Now I can’t be loaded with any film,” it said. “Are you happy?” I was not.

I was, however, the owner of a screwdriver.

I soon discovered that at some point in the middle of winding the roll it got stuck, and just fruitlessly tore a hole in the film rather than, you know, rewinding. I also managed to expose a surprising amount of film as a result. After heading to the basement to get the rest of the film out, and contemplating just how many shots I had lost to time, like tears in the rain, I contemplated the KE30. I kind of liked the idea of it, a simple point and shoot to get people interested in film. But I also discovered that it was somewhat unable to cope when things went wrong. But maybe it was my fault, maybe I should have listened to its warnings about only using Kodak film. Maybe I shouldn’t have taunted it.

Or maybe it was just a bad design.

Then I got the film back, and I was in for a surprise.

Then I remembered that I didn't notice that the lens was covered in gunk for the first several frames and cleaned it later. At which point I was in for a second, better surprise.

This camera was… good. Very good. Details were nicely rendered, the exposure was tightly controlled. It was sharp, which is kind of a crapshoot with a cheap camera like this, especially since we are talking fixed focus. I was not prepared for anything to look this good, it was - dare I say it - one of my favorite rolls I've ever shot. It compared favorably to all of my beloved SLRs and rangefinders.

Did it attempt to eat the Fomapan because it loved it too much?

I do still worry about actually using it, because at the end of the day it still failed to rewind all the way, and by design it is inherently difficult to rescue a film from it.Honestly this was the biggest surprise I've ever had when dealing with photography, at every step of the process. For all the headaches it gave me, this camera was, without question, worth every penny.

Next up: Using some oddball film with a Canonet 28. Squint really hard and you might be able to see it below.