Photography

On and off, I’ve been taking photos since my high school days. Over the years I went through lots of (moslty second-hand) gear. Of course I started out with whatever gear was cheap and available. Back then this meant analog photography.

Digital Photography

Back in 2014 I bought a used Sony A7 and have been using it ever since. Probably the camera that really kicked the mirrorless revolution into high gear. Full-frame sensor and compact in size and (for the time) really good high-ISO performance. As it’s mirrorless, it can also easily adapt pretty any old lens. The 24 megapixels of resolution feel very much like the sweet spot for me: enough to do large prints or crop a bit, but not so big that my computer falls apart handling them.

The only downsides are the relatively high battery draw and the somewhat slow startup time. Anyways, I’m planning to use it until it falls apart.

• Samyang FE 35mm f/2.8 - affordable (relatively), tiny, lightweight and tack-sharp. This is my default travel lens when I don’t want to pack anything else. Autofocus could be a bit faster, but it never really failed me.

• Sony FE 85mm f/1.8 - probably my favourite lens. Tack sharp, great bokeh, and fast AF even on my old A7. I find this focal lens fantastic for poratraits, compressing landscape or taking detail shots.

• Sony FE 28mm f/2 - Great little wide-angle lens with a large aperture.

Before that I used a trusty old second-hand Nikon D80 with 18-105mm and 35mm f/1.8 lenses.

And then I went with some third-party lenses for special purposes. The Tokina 17mm f/3.5 is an affordable ultra-wide lens. Corner-sharpness is of course lacking, but it still takes great pictures if you’re not pixel-peeping.

A Vivitar 90mm f/2.8 Macro, which I mostly got to digitize negatives.

Analog Photography

I haven’t done much analog photography in recent years, but much more when I was a student. Back then prices for analog gear and films weren’t as crazy as they are now.

35mm film

I basically went all in on the Canon FD system. Canon changed their lens mount system when making the switch to autofocus (EF mount), and the FD lenses are generally not compatible with the EF mount. Thus, most of Canon FD gear was cheap to get on eBay back then.

• Canon F-1 - a hunk of a camera, but feels indestructable and will likely outlast me.
• Canon FD 28mm f/2.8 – small, light and really affordable wide angle lens. I used it a lot for landscape shots on my Sony A7 before buying an AF-equivalent.

• Canon FD 35mm f/3.5 – the chrome-nosed one. An incredibly heavy chunk of solid metal that feels indestructible. Got it for cheap off eBay, but so far haven’t used it much.
• Canon FD 50mm f/1.4 – my favourite old lens. It was also pretty much stuck on my Sony A7 before I invested into some autofocus lenses.

• Canon FD 70-210mm f/4 – very affordable lens with acceptable image quality. Overall I tend to not use focal lengths longer than 85mm much.

120mm film

Zenza Bronica C2 from the sixties. A great, heavy and loud medium format camera that just works – without the Hasselblad tax. I have both a prism viewfinder and a top-down one. It comes with a Nikkor-P 75mm f/2.8 lens.

Light metering

I can’t remember how, but somehow I ended up with a Gossen Sixtomat X3 light meter. Its a curious old little selenium meter manufactured in the 1950s and was apparently sold by the millions back then, when cameras rarely had built-in light meters. I’ve mostly used it for metering black & white exposures with my Bronica C2, or whenever the batteries die in my Canon F-1 - and it still seems to work admirably.

Development

I use common drug store film development services in Germany for any color films, which send them to CEWE for processing as far as I know. But I usually develop black & white films myself using a little bit of gear.

• AP Double Developing Tank, which fits either two 35mm films or one 120mm film
• AGFA Rodinal developer – simple to use and incredibly efficient when using a stand development technique.
• Tetenal Superfix Odourless fixer
• A generic bag to move film into the develping tank

I’ve been considering to get a LAB-BOX multi-format development tank to make the hole process easier.

Digitizing

I used to use a second-hand Canon CanoScan 8800F flatbed scanner to digitize negatives. It was incredibly clunky and slow to use and the results were mediocre. One major problem was that the included film holders significantly increase the distance between the scanners glass surface and the negative, which results in slightly out-of-focus scans. Placing the negatives directly onto the glass remedies that. But you loose the convenience of the negatives being held in place when closing the lid. Scanning negatives directly on glass can also lead to Newton rings caused by reflections between the negative and the glass.