“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
— Elliott Erwitt
The BEST Cheap Film Camera for Travel? Nikon N65 and Tamron 28-200mm f/3.8-5.6
Are the Nikon N65 and Tamron 28-200mm the peaches-and-cream pairing of budget film photography, or do they clash like toothpaste and orange juice? After taking this decidedly unfashionable combination with me to Tokyo, I think I have a pretty good idea of where it sits in the hierarchy of cheap film cameras.
I travel quite a bit for work, and one of the recurring problems is that my camera collection stubbornly refuses to fit into a suitcase. Eventually, there comes a point where you have to accept that I’m taking one camera and one lens, once you have packed essentials such as a toothbrush, passport and your pet iguana. That makes size, weight, versatility and price rather important considerations.
The Nikon N65, also known as the F65 or Nikon U depending on where you live, is hardly the sort of camera that gets the heart racing. It is a late-era film SLR, made from plastic, finished in a rather unfortunate silver colour and generally ignored by photographers in favour of more glamorous cameras. It is, in other words, absolutely perfect for me.
The camera weighs less than 400 grams, yet manages to pack in an impressive collection of features. You get Program, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority and Manual modes, along with 3D Matrix metering, exposure compensation, shutter speeds up to 1/2000 second, TTL flash and even deliberate double exposures. It is very much a product of the period when manufacturers had essentially perfected the SLR and were busy figuring out how many features they could squeeze into something ordinary people could afford.
Its biggest problem may simply be that it isn’t cool. The silver plastic body looks more like something you’d find in a child’s dressing-up box than around the neck of a serious photographer. There is a black version if you’re particularly concerned about your sartorial reputation, but the N65 isn’t going to impress anybody at a photography exhibition. Fortunately, I have no reputation to protect.
The Tamron Superzoom Problem
The other half of the equation is the Tamron 28-200mm f/3.8-5.6 Macro AF Aspherical XR (IF), a lens whose name contains approximately as many acronyms as some entire camera systems. Tamron was one of the pioneers of the all-in-one zoom, producing a 28-200mm as early as 1992 at a time when achieving that kind of focal range without producing complete optical rubbish was a genuine challenge.
This particular version comes from the later generations of the design and includes aspherical and high-refractive-index elements. It isn’t going to produce the sort of three-dimensional pop that inspires lengthy forum arguments, but it is generally sharp, well corrected and has enough contrast to produce a pleasingly modern-looking image on film.
That’s important because this isn’t really a test of ultimate optical performance. I’m not trying to determine whether the Tamron can defeat a modern professional zoom in a forensic pixel-peeping contest. The whole point is finding the sweet spot between price, size, quality and versatility. A 28-200mm gives me the ability to photograph a cathedral, a street scene or something considerably further away without changing lenses, and that’s enormously useful when travelling.
There are limitations, of course. The relatively slow maximum aperture means this isn’t the lens I’d choose for exploring the darkest corners of Tokyo with ISO 100 film. In those circumstances, a fast 35mm or 50mm prime would be a much better choice. At 200mm, you also need to be careful with camera shake, particularly when shooting slow film such as Kentmere 100.
But when the light is good and I hold the camera properly, the results are more than good enough for my purposes. Some photographs were soft, but that wasn’t necessarily the fault of the lens. At 200mm, a little movement is enough to turn a potentially sharp photograph into something resembling a vague memory of having taken a photograph.
And when everything comes together, the results are surprisingly convincing. Some of the photographs I took in Tokyo was easily sharp enough to have been produced by a much more expensive camera and lens combination, while costing a fraction of the price and weighing considerably less.
The Budget Travel Sweet Spot
Taking the N65 and Tamron together, the entire combination weighs less than about 750 grams. That makes it a remarkably portable package considering the enormous focal-length range it provides. A 28mm isn’t ultra-wide, but it’s wide enough for most street photography without introducing excessive distortion, while 200mm gives you enough reach to isolate details and compress layers in a busy urban environment.
That’s exactly what I found useful in West Shinjuku and Nakano. I wasn’t simply trying to photograph the spectacular parts of Tokyo; I wanted to capture the mixture of business, social life, signage, buildings and random human moments that gives these places their character. The 200mm end of the zoom was particularly useful for compressing layers of windows and billboards, while also allowing me to pick out small moments happening within the chaos.
There are alternatives. Nikon’s F75 and F80 are better cameras and solve some of the N65’s irritating quirks, although they are correspondingly more expensive and, in the case of the F80, heavier. The N65’s Dynamic AF can decide to change focusing behaviour when it detects movement, which isn’t particularly helpful when you’re carefully composing something near the edge of the frame. I also find the inability to override DX film coding frustrating.
There are plenty of alternative lenses, too. Nikon’s 28-105mm and 28-85mm are excellent inexpensive choices if you don’t need the 200mm reach, while the humble 28-80mm can provide a remarkably cheap and lightweight solution. There are equivalent combinations from Canon, Pentax, Minolta and others, so this isn’t necessarily a recommendation that everyone should rush out and buy an N65.
For me, though, this combination hits that elusive golden triangle of heft, price and quality remarkably well. It isn’t perfect, and it certainly isn’t glamorous, but that’s not really the point. If I wanted perfection, I wouldn’t be shooting 25-year-old plastic cameras and cheap black-and-white film in the first place.
The N65 and Tamron 28-200mm are cheap, light, versatile and capable of producing photographs that are more than good enough. More importantly, they let me travel with one camera and one lens without feeling as though I’ve sacrificed the ability to photograph whatever happens to come along. In the end, that’s probably a much more useful quality than being cool.
So, will I be taking this combination on my next holiday? Quite possibly. And if that means leaving the expensive digital camera at home while carrying around a silver plastic Nikon that looks like it escaped from a 2000s department store, so be it. Sometimes the cheap seats have a surprisingly good view.
Reconnecting with the creative process, featuring the Apexel ATL T5-10x telephoto smartphone lens
Photography for Me, Not for Everyone Else
Just as well we have photography and video to memorialise our lives and leave a trace like digital skidmarks over human history. I’m not getting maudlin here, but I’ve been thinking about what photography will mean to me when I’m old. For some photographers, it’s about making art that is unique, groundbreaking and capable of saying something about the human condition that has never been uttered before. For me, though, I suspect I’ll be much more interested in opening an old album and looking at imperfect renderings of perfect personal memories.
That got me thinking about how I could get back to the roots of photography and make images for myself rather than for an imaginary audience. How could I create photographs that invoke the feelings of a particular time and place instead of becoming carefully polished artefacts designed to impress somebody else? The answer, I think, is to embrace imperfection rather than constantly striving to eliminate it.
A recent family trip to Sydney and southern New South Wales became an opportunity to experiment with exactly that idea. It was a low-key holiday, so I decided it deserved some low-key photography. I ended up approaching the whole thing through three pillars: printing, analogue journalling and using deliberately compromised equipment.
Printing Memories Instead of Leaving Them on a Hard Drive
The first of these is printing. How many of us actually go through our Lightroom catalogues years later and relive our experiences? I’ve had access to an A2 printer at work and occasionally printed photographs, usually putting them into cheap frames. Part of the problem is that the frames themselves can be rather underwhelming, but there’s also a lingering feeling that my photographs simply aren’t important enough to deserve that much wall space.
More recently, I’ve started thinking about printing in a smaller and more thematic way. I printed a series of Tokyo photographs that concentrated on little details around Shibuya rather than trying to capture the whole city. There’s something satisfying about taking something enormous and making it small enough to hold in your hands.
That eventually led me to a Kodak Mini Shot 2 Retro. It’s a camera, but it’s also a printer, which makes it particularly appealing for this sort of project. I bought mine second-hand because apparently I can’t resist buying photography equipment, but the real attraction is the ability to print photographs almost instantly. I also had a batch of 6×4 prints made at Officeworks, which is the Australian equivalent of Walmart for office supplies, and while they use inkjet rather than wet-lab technology, they’re inexpensive and perfectly adequate for this kind of memory-making.
A Cheap Phone Lens and a Very Bad Drawing
The second pillar was analogue journalling, which turned out to be considerably more frightening than I expected. My wife enjoys sketching and writing, so I thought it would be nice to document the NSW trip together on actual paper. Unfortunately, I can’t draw. My hands have the fine motor skills of a camel hoof, and that’s before we consider the neural spaghetti connecting my eyes to my fingers.
Still, that’s rather the point. This project isn’t about producing beautiful drawings. It’s about engaging with the process and accepting that the result might be terrible. There’s something strangely liberating about deliberately removing the expectation that everything needs to be good.
The third pillar was a tiny piece of equipment that actually prompted this whole experiment: the Apexel APL-T5-10X Variable Telephoto Lens. Apexel sent it to me free of charge and I get to keep it, but there were no conditions attached and my opinion remains entirely my own. The lens is designed to turn your phone into something resembling a 150–300mm telephoto camera, which sounds suspiciously ambitious for something that fits in your pocket.
Surprisingly, it doesn’t feel cheap. It’s a substantial little object with a nicely knurled metal exterior, glass elements and a multi-coated optical system. It weighs around 171 grams and has damped zoom and focus rings with a reasonably long throw. The phone adapter is also much more robust than the usual dog-clip contraptions I’ve encountered with smartphone accessories.
The results, naturally, aren’t going to challenge my full-frame Nikon or even my Micro Four Thirds cameras. There’s some softness, highlights can become a little bloomy and you have to contend with camera shake and a surprisingly narrow plane of focus. But when it gets things right, the images are actually pretty good, especially considering what this thing is. You certainly won’t be making enormous A2 prints from it, but for small prints or a journal, it works remarkably well.
Why Imperfection Might Actually Be the Point
Using the lens around wetlands was fun, although I quickly discovered that phones don’t particularly enjoy shooting telephoto video. A tripod helps, as does using the right camera on the phone, and there can be some circular vignetting if you attach the lens to a wide-angle camera. These are compromises, but that’s exactly what this project was about.
Back in Perth, I continued the journal, adding photographs and attempting to draw a bird that somehow transformed into what looked like a Liverbird on crack. It was not my finest artistic achievement, but it was mine. The important thing was that these imperfect tools forced me to slow down and actually consider what I was doing.
That might be the biggest benefit of all. The Kodak printer, the Apexel lens, the pen and the paper are all relatively cheap and accessible, but they also introduce friction into the creative process. You have to think, plan and physically engage with what you’re making. A blank page is intimidating, but somehow it becomes less intimidating when you give yourself permission to make something bad.
I’ve realised that reconnecting with analogue processes has made me feel creatively engaged in a way I wasn’t expecting. Perfection is highly overrated. The world is already full of perfectly manufactured objects and clinically perfect images that can sometimes feel more like products of mass production than things made by an individual.
When I travel, I’d much rather eat a home-cooked meal than a Michelin-starred dish, and believe me, when I cook, perfection is not exactly on the menu. But something made with love and consideration carries memories and feelings that have value far beyond any objective measurement.
That’s probably what I want from my photography too. I might not draw in this journal every day, and I may never become remotely competent at sketching, but when I return to it years from now, I’ll remember the trip. The crooked drawings, cheap prints and imperfect photographs will probably mean more to me than the technically flawless images ever could.
In a strange way, this also connects back to YouTube. Taking photographs, curating them and turning them into a story helps me relive my experiences, while sharing them allows those memories to become something communal. I’ve been thinking about doing something similar with my accumulated photographs from Japan, perhaps turning them into a book or zine around ideas such as wabi-sabi—finding beauty in imperfection—and ikigai, engaging with activities for their intrinsic pleasure.
Perhaps that’s where this whole experiment is heading. Maybe it’s a little bit of Shu-Ha-Ri: learning the basics, absorbing the experience and eventually finding your own creative trajectory. For me, at least, that trajectory seems to involve fewer demands for perfection, more tangible creativity and, most importantly, enjoying the process along the way.
Is shooting expired film actually worth it? Or am I just chasing rainbows?
Agfacolor 200 20 years later
The recent demise of my beloved Fuji medium format point-and-shoot left me with photographic trauma that still hasn’t quite healed. If there were anything capable of adding fresh scars to that emotional damage, it would surely be expired film. After all, paying good money for something that’s already gone off feels completely irrational. I wouldn’t eat a mouldy sandwich that’s been sitting in a school bag for twenty years, so why would I willingly load twenty-year-old film into a camera?
Yet expired film has an undeniable appeal. Plenty of photographers swear by its unpredictable character, embracing colour shifts, grain and imperfections as part of the experience. I’ve never really belonged to that particular camp. If expired film were dramatically cheaper than fresh stock, I might understand the attraction, but these days many old rolls cost almost as much as new ones.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to buy this roll. My brother-in-law picked up some AgfaColor XRG 200 while visiting Spain several years ago and kindly passed a few rolls on to me. So, armed with film that expired in 2001 and expectations hovering somewhere below sea level, it was time to see whether this forgotten emulsion still had anything left to offer.
The original plan involved an early morning trip to Perth’s beaches, but the weather had other ideas. Rain is such a novelty in Perth that the first shower feels almost like a public celebration. Once the excitement wears off, though, you’re simply wet, so I postponed the outing and instead headed into the city under far more typical blue skies.
Giving Old Film Every Chance
Conventional wisdom suggests overexposing expired colour negative film by roughly one stop for every decade past its expiry date. At 21 years old, that meant treating this ISO 200 film as roughly ISO 50, while also remaining willing to give it even more light if conditions allowed.
I also tried to stack the odds in my favour by using a Nikon N80, whose Matrix metering was considered impressively sophisticated when both the camera and this film were new. Paired with Nikon’s versatile 28-300mm zoom, it offered the flexibility to photograph whatever caught my eye, even if the relatively slow aperture wasn’t ideal for ageing film.
I’d never been particularly fond of Agfa’s colour films, even when they were fresh. Compared to Kodak or Fuji, I’ve always found Agfa prone to muddy shadows and an overly magenta colour palette. Naturally, I expected two decades of ageing to make those weaknesses even worse.
Instead, I was greeted with something unexpected.
Better Than Expected
The first victory was simply that the film worked at all. Given my previous encounters with expired film, I’d fully expected another disaster. Instead, the generous exposure produced enough image density to cut through the inevitable base fog, leaving negatives that scanned surprisingly well.
There was certainly evidence of the film’s age. Grain was more noticeable, colours had shifted slightly and contrast wasn’t quite what fresh film would deliver. Even so, the results were far more usable than I’d anticipated. Static subjects came out especially well, while moving subjects occasionally defeated both the ageing emulsion and the slower zoom lens. Rather than feeling ruined, though, some of those imperfect frames developed a charm all of their own.
Reviewing my favourite images, I realised I’d accidentally assembled a mixture of street photography, architecture, minimalism and abstract compositions. More importantly, I genuinely liked several of them. Considering how low my expectations had been, that felt like a genuine success.
Expired film may never replace fresh stock in my camera bag, and I’m still not convinced it’s worth today’s inflated prices. However, this roll reminded me that photography doesn’t always reward certainty. Sometimes lowering your expectations leaves plenty of room to be pleasantly surprised.
Unlike my dearly departed Fuji GA645Zi, this ancient roll of Agfa actually delivered. That’s enough to spare it from photographic damnation, at least for now. As for me, I may be approaching my own use-by date, but there are still plenty more questionable photographic adventures waiting just around the corner. If nothing else, they should provide fresh material for the next chapter of my ongoing catalogue of photographic misadventures.
The Slow Death of My Fujifilm GA645Zi – a Posthumous Review
A Medium Format Camera in Berlin
The beginning of the end for my Fujifilm GA645Zi can be traced back to Berlin in mid-2024. After spending several miserable days confined to a hotel room with COVID, my final evening brought just enough recovery to venture outside. Alexanderplatz seemed like the perfect place to stretch both my legs and the shutter of a camera that had travelled with me for the better part of a decade.
The GA645Zi is an unusual machine. It’s a medium format point-and-shoot from 1998 that somehow combines professional image quality with the appearance of an oversized family holiday camera. It shoots 6×4.5 negatives, which may be the smallest of the medium format options, but they’re still enormous compared to 35mm film. That extra real estate gives your photographs an incredible amount of detail while still allowing a reasonably compact camera to accompany you on your travels.
Of course, not every photograph from Berlin was a masterpiece. That’s partly because photography is an excellent way to discover your own shortcomings on a regular basis, but the camera itself deserves some of the blame. On paper, the specifications don’t exactly inspire confidence. The 55-90mm zoom translates to roughly 34-56mm in 35mm terms, with only four zoom positions to choose from. At the long end, the maximum aperture falls to a leisurely f/6.9, leaving very little room for low-light photography while still giving you all the opportunities for camera shake that come with a 90mm lens.
Despite those limitations, the lens itself is astonishingly sharp. The GA645Zi was never a cheap camera, and while the body feels disappointingly plasticky, the negatives it produces are spectacular. Zooming into the scans reveals detail that seems almost endless, reminding you why photographers continue to pay increasingly eye-watering prices for these cameras today. I bought mine around ten years ago for roughly a quarter of what they’re worth now, and for years it rewarded me with images that justified every compromise.
The Beginning of the End
As the Berlin sun disappeared, so too did my confidence in the camera’s future. The notorious weakness of the GA645Zi is its rear LCD panel, connected by a ribbon cable that flexes every time the camera is opened for loading film. Eventually that cable fails, and mine began displaying the first telltale flickers that countless owners before me had documented online.
The camera still functioned, so I loaded another roll and headed into the gathering darkness. Night photography with this Fuji was always going to be challenging. Ilford HP5 pushed to ISO 1600 has served me well in other cities, and I’ve even shot colour film after dark in places like Shinjuku and South Korean markets. Berlin, however, felt different. Empty squares, dim lighting and reflective surfaces made flash photography more frustrating than helpful, while my own developing mistakes probably didn’t do the negatives any favours.
Rather than fight the darkness, I eventually decided to embrace it. Cropping away unnecessary empty space and leaning into deep shadows produced images that felt more atmospheric than documentary. Streetlights reflecting from tram tracks, isolated figures disappearing into blackness and fragments of illuminated architecture became studies in mood rather than perfect technical photographs. Some images asked viewers to complete the story themselves, filling the darkness with their own interpretation.
Living with a Flawed Masterpiece
The GA645Zi wasn’t finished just yet. On a later trip through China, the LCD had deteriorated so badly that I could barely read it, but I managed to improvise. By comparing the camera’s exposure readings against a phone light meter, I convinced myself that as long as the ISO setting matched, perhaps the missing display wasn’t the end of the world.
After all, the qualities that make this camera special remained intact. The viewfinder still displays shutter speed and aperture information, which is essential given the relatively slow lens and the razor-thin depth of field that medium format provides. When the autofocus gets things right, the results are genuinely superb.
Unfortunately, “when” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The autofocus has always been somewhat optimistic about its own abilities, occasionally deciding that somewhere near your intended subject is close enough. The camera is also painfully slow. Switching it on feels remarkably similar to trying to wake a teenager for school. It pauses, contemplates life for a moment, and then reluctantly gets moving with as much complaining as possible.
That makes it a poor choice for decisive street photography, yet somehow it still produced some of my favourite travel images. Whether wandering through Vietnam, Japan, Barcelona or elsewhere, the combination of medium format resolution and an unobtrusive automatic camera often resulted in photographs that simply felt different. Massive negatives are arguably better suited to sweeping architecture, dramatic landscapes and iconic locations than everyday street scenes, but the GA645Zi always tempted me to use it for everything.
One of its final adventures took place in Shenzhen’s Overseas Chinese Town, where replicas of famous landmarks from around the world provided an appropriately surreal setting for a camera that itself seemed full of contradictions. A sophisticated medium format system disguised as a disposable point-and-shoot felt perfectly at home photographing imitation Venice inside one of the world’s youngest megacities.
Saying Goodbye
By the end of that trip, the LCD had finally died completely. Unfortunately, the problem turned out to be more serious than simply losing information on the display. Whatever electronics had failed also prevented the film from advancing correctly. Film would load, exposure compensation still functioned, but the camera simply refused to wind on. After years of faithful service, it had reached the end of the road.
Over the past decade this Fuji accompanied me across Europe and Asia. It documented family history, quiet personal moments and famous destinations alike. It visited places connected to my family’s experiences during the First World War, wandered through Aix-en-Provence, Kuala Lumpur, Japan and countless other cities, while also recording the ordinary family photographs that often become the most precious years later. Medium format has a wonderful way of preserving tiny details that you barely notice at the time but come to treasure with hindsight.
Looking back through its final rolls, there are still plenty of photographs worth celebrating. As always, they combine people, architecture and those odd little moments that somehow define travel better than famous landmarks ever could. The camera occasionally produced technical disasters alongside genuine gems, but perhaps that’s part of its charm.
I’ll genuinely miss the Fujifilm GA645Zi, although not enough to pay today’s inflated prices for another one. Losing it felt surprisingly similar to saying goodbye to an ageing pet: increasingly slow, occasionally unreliable and prone to little accidents, yet a loyal companion that had been there for some remarkable experiences.
Thankfully, medium format photography doesn’t end here. There are other cameras waiting for future adventures, including one substantially larger beast with enormous 6×9 negatives and, perhaps most importantly, absolutely no electronics waiting to self-destruct. It may make me look even more ridiculous carrying it through airports and city streets, but at least I won’t be worrying about ribbon cables every time I load a roll of film.
The Voigtlander 15mm Super Wide-Heliar f/4.5 for M39 in Vienna: A Great Lens, just not for Digital
There are lenses you use every day, and then there are lenses that completely change the way you see the world. The Voigtländer 15mm Super Wide-Heliar f/4.5 LTM definitely falls into the second category.
I recently packed it for a trip to Vienna, partly because the city’s grand architecture seemed like the perfect playground for an ultra-wide lens, and partly because I wanted to see whether this quirky little optic still deserved its reputation. After spending time with it on both my Leica M2 and Nikon Z6, I came away impressed—but also reminded that a 15mm lens demands far more from the photographer than most people realise.
This isn’t the sort of lens you casually leave on your camera. It’s more like a special occasion lens that rewards patience, careful composition and a willingness to embrace the strange.
Learning to See at 15mm
Fifteen millimetres is unbelievably wide. Point it at a scene and it doesn’t simply capture what’s in front of you—it seems to swallow everything around it as well.
The first thing you notice is how dramatically it changes perspective. Objects close to the camera become enormous, while anything further away quickly shrinks into the distance. Straightforward compositions suddenly become much more complicated because every corner of the frame starts demanding your attention. If there isn’t something interesting happening throughout the image, you’ll often end up with a photograph that contains an awful lot of… well… not very much.
That’s why using this lens feels like learning photography all over again. You can’t rely on the habits you’ve built shooting 35mm or 50mm lenses. Instead, you have to train yourself to notice foreground subjects, converging lines and the relationships between objects across the entire frame.
Vienna turned out to be the ideal place to practise. The city is packed with grand Baroque and Neoclassical buildings, wide boulevards and impressive public spaces that suit this kind of exaggerated perspective beautifully. Even ordinary streets can suddenly feel dramatic when viewed through such an expansive field of view.
Not every outing went entirely to plan, though. During one photo walk I accidentally wandered into what appeared to be the filming of a historical production and quickly realised I wasn’t quite as welcome as I thought. I made a fairly discreet exit, although not before managing to expose a few frames that will probably confuse future historians if anyone ever discovers the negatives.
Small Lens, Serious Engineering
One of the most surprising things about the Voigtländer is just how tiny it is. Despite its compact dimensions, it feels reassuringly solid rather than toy-like. At around 190 grams it’s light enough to carry all day without thinking about it, yet substantial enough to inspire confidence.
Mine is the original Leica Thread Mount version, first released in 1999 alongside Voigtländer’s Bessa cameras. It’s actually relatively modern by Leica screw mount standards, although prices have climbed dramatically since I bought mine back in 2017.
The design is remarkably clever. The aperture ring sits at the front of the lens, which initially feels unusual, but makes perfect sense given how compact everything is. With such a wide focal length, depth of field is enormous anyway, so you’re rarely making huge focus adjustments.
There are a few compromises. The fixed lens hood means you can’t easily use filters, and it requires a slip-on lens cap that looks lovely but costs a frightening amount to replace if it disappears somewhere on your travels.
What continues to impress me, though, is how well the optics behave. Considering just how absurdly wide this lens is, it does an excellent job of keeping straight lines straight. That’s a genuine engineering achievement and makes it much more useful for architectural photography than many people might expect.
Film Still Has the Advantage
Using the lens on my Leica M2 produced exactly the sort of images I’d hoped for. The negatives showed plenty of character, dramatic perspective and surprisingly clean rendering across the frame. Things became a little more complicated once I mounted it on my Nikon Z6.
This isn’t really the lens’s fault. Older ultra-wide lenses were designed for film, not modern digital sensors, and the way light reaches a sensor is quite different. On digital cameras you can end up with colour casts, heavier vignetting and smeared corners, particularly towards the edges of the frame.
Some of my digital images definitely showed those characteristics. In certain photographs the cooler colour shifts actually added atmosphere, especially during Vienna’s blue hour, but after a while they became distracting enough that I enabled lens corrections in Lightroom. That’s something I rarely do because I generally prefer working with a lens’s quirks rather than correcting them away, but in this case the adjustments helped produce more natural-looking files while still preserving plenty of the lens’s personality.
Interestingly, those same issues simply weren’t present on film. Looking at the Leica negatives afterwards reinforced my feeling that this first-generation version of the 15mm still feels most at home on analogue cameras.
A Lens Worth Owning… Just Not Every Day
The biggest challenge with the Voigtländer isn’t sharpness or build quality. It’s simply the focal length. Fifteen millimetres can produce wonderfully dramatic photographs, but only when you have a composition that deserves it. Without a strong foreground subject or carefully arranged scene, everything risks becoming small and insignificant. It’s surprisingly easy to fill a frame with lots of space and very little interest.
There’s also the occasional occupational hazard of photographing your own fingers. When the lens is this wide, it’s alarmingly easy to discover afterwards that part of your hand has made an unexpected guest appearance in the corner of the frame.
Even so, I can’t help liking this peculiar little lens. It encourages experimentation, rewards careful observation and produces photographs that don’t look quite like those from anything else in my collection.
Would I recommend it? Absolutely, but only if you understand what you’re getting into. This isn’t an everyday walk-around lens, and it isn’t designed to make photography easier. What it does offer is a genuinely different way of seeing the world, and sometimes that’s exactly the creative challenge you need.
If you’re prepared to work with its quirks rather than against them, the Voigtländer 15mm Super Wide-Heliar remains one of the most entertaining ultra-wide lenses you can mount on a film camera.
Revisiting Sweden after 12 Years. Have I Become a Better Photographer?
Twelve years is a surprisingly long time. When I first visited Stockholm in 2013, my children were younger, my hair contained considerably less grey, and I approached photography with the kind of wide-eyed enthusiasm that only comes from exploring somewhere completely new. Returning for a brief 24-hour visit felt like stepping into a time machine—not just to revisit Sweden, but to confront an awkward question I’d been quietly avoiding: after more than a decade behind the camera, have I actually become a better photographer?
It’s the sort of question that’s difficult to answer objectively. Experience should bring improvement, but creativity doesn’t always follow a neat upward trajectory. As I wandered through the cobbled streets of Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s wonderfully preserved old town, I couldn’t help wondering whether my photography had continued to evolve or whether I’d simply become older, more cautious, and perhaps a little too comfortable with my own habits.
Getting Lost, Finding Perspective
My journey began in appropriately chaotic fashion when I managed to board a train in completely the wrong direction. While I’d love to pretend this was some profound metaphor about life and artistic growth, it really was nothing more than another demonstration of my famously terrible sense of direction. Fortunately, even mistakes can become opportunities, and the unexpected detour delivered a train station that looked like an 8-bit video game, complete with geometric tiles and an almost surreal atmosphere.
Eventually I escaped my accidental journey into Tron and arrived in Gamla Stan. Emerging from the station felt like walking straight into the 14th century, albeit one populated by tourists armed with smartphones and takeaway coffee. Stockholm itself hadn’t changed dramatically over the years, but my relationship with photographing it certainly had.
Looking back at my original visit revealed just how much both photography and technology have evolved. In 2013 my camera of choice was the humble Lumix GF1, a Micro Four Thirds camera whose autofocus could generously be described as leisurely. Today I shoot with a Nikon Z6 paired with a versatile 24-200mm lens, giving me vastly superior image quality and low-light performance, even if the autofocus still occasionally reminds me not to become too complacent.
Ironically, despite carrying far more capable equipment today, I’ve also embraced older photographic practices. My favourite camera doesn’t even shoot video or include a built-in light meter. In some ways, my technical journey has become less about chasing newer features and more about rediscovering slower, simpler ways of working.
Escaping the HDR Era
Perhaps the biggest difference between my old work and my current photography lies in the editing. Revisiting my 2013 images was a sobering reminder that I, like so many photographers of the era, was hopelessly addicted to HDR. Every image seemed determined to display every possible shadow, highlight and colour simultaneously, often resulting in pictures that looked less like reality and more like someone had dropped a rainbow into a blender.
To be fair, cameras at the time genuinely struggled with dynamic range, and HDR techniques often solved real technical limitations. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, subtlety was abandoned in favour of aggressively saturated skies, exaggerated textures and every filter available in software like Photomatix and the Nik Collection. If the software offered a dramatic effect, I was almost certainly going to apply it.
Thankfully, both technology and my own tastes have matured. Modern full-frame sensors capture an astonishing amount of information without elaborate processing, meaning there’s far less need to rescue an image in post-production. More importantly, I’ve come to appreciate restraint. Rather than chasing dramatic effects, I now find myself drawn to quieter, more natural edits with a gentle, almost Kodachrome-inspired warmth that allows the subject to speak for itself.
What Has Stayed the Same?
Not everything has changed, however. Looking through my old photographs revealed several themes that have remained remarkably consistent throughout my photographic life. I’ve always been fascinated by geometry, architecture and the patterns created by the built environment. Whether it’s staircases, railway stations or the narrow streets of an old city, strong shapes continue to draw my attention.
I’ve also always enjoyed finding humour and unexpected visual juxtapositions. Some of my favourite images are those that invite viewers to pause for a second and ask themselves exactly what’s happening. Street photography rarely hands you those moments on a plate, but they’re immensely satisfying when everything aligns.
One area where I have changed significantly is my attitude towards obvious tourist photographs. Twelve years ago, photographing famous viewpoints felt fresh and exciting. Today those same locations have been documented millions of times across social media, making it increasingly difficult to create something that feels original. It’s not that these places have become less beautiful—they’ve simply become visually familiar.
That realisation has encouraged me to search for smaller stories instead of iconic postcards. Rather than collecting landmarks, I’m more interested in collecting moments.
Growing as a Photographer—and as a Person
Comparing six photographs from my recent visit with those from 2013 produced an unexpected conclusion. Technically, my modern images are undoubtedly stronger. The compositions are cleaner, the editing is more restrained and there’s a greater consistency throughout the collection. Yet I can’t completely dismiss the older photographs.
There was an exuberance to my earlier work that I sometimes miss. I experimented more freely with unusual angles, slower shutter speeds and motion blur, unconcerned about whether everything fitted neatly into a recognisable personal style. Perhaps experience has improved my judgment, but maybe it has also made me a little more cautious.
One change genuinely stands out, though. My newer photographs contain more people, and those people feel less like decorative elements placed within an architectural composition. Increasingly, they have become the subject rather than simply part of the scenery. Their expressions, gestures and interactions bring warmth and humanity that my earlier work often lacked.
Photography has always acted as both a shield and a bridge for me. A camera creates distance, offering a comfortable excuse to observe the world without fully participating in it. At the same time, it can become a surprisingly effective way of connecting with people and making sense of the wonderfully awkward complexity of human interaction.
Perhaps that’s the real evolution after all. Maybe becoming a better photographer isn’t simply about mastering composition or choosing more tasteful editing techniques. Maybe it’s about gradually becoming more curious, more empathetic and more willing to see the people behind the photographs.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that in another twelve years I’ll look back at my 2025 images and cringe just as enthusiastically as I now do at my HDR experiments. If that happens, perhaps it will simply be proof that the journey is still continuing—and that’s probably exactly how it should be.
Introducing the Canon 28mm f/2.8 LTM to Shenzhen and Vienna
I’ve complained before that 28mm is probably the most boring focal length in photography. It’s the optical equivalent of plain toast: perfectly serviceable but rarely exciting. It sits somewhere between the intimacy of a 35mm and the drama of something genuinely wide, making it feel suspiciously similar to the field of view on your phone. If nothing else, it’s useful for photographing your lunch.
Despite my lack of enthusiasm, there was one obvious gap in my rangefinder kit. Finding a good 28mm lens for the Leica Thread Mount isn’t exactly easy because wide-angle lens design in the 1950s involved plenty of optical compromises. The obvious budget option is the Soviet Orion-15, but its relatively slow f/5.6 aperture and steadily rising second-hand prices meant it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. At the other end of the spectrum sat Leica’s own Elmarit, but buying one of those would probably have required selling one of my children, and they’re now old enough to understand employment law.
Instead, while wandering around Shinjuku in search of something completely different, I stumbled across the Canon 28mm f/2.8. It struck a happy compromise between affordability and quality, and although it lacks the red dot that causes photographers to lose all sense of financial responsibility, it still feels wonderfully substantial. Built from brass and glass, it’s compact, beautifully made and just heavy enough to remind you that cameras used to be engineered rather than assembled.
Its pedigree isn’t exactly shabby either. This was one of the lenses favoured by Garry Winogrand as he documented post-war America, producing one of the most influential bodies of street photography ever assembled. Winogrand died at just fifty-six, leaving behind thousands of undeveloped rolls of film. I’ve somehow managed to outlive him already, although my own contribution to photographic history currently consists of a steadily growing archive of YouTube videos that algorithmically disappear into the digital abyss.
Still, one or two people are watching, so I thought it was finally time to give this little Canon the outing it deserved.
A Vintage Lens in Shenzhen and Vienna
Like many of my photography trips, this one began with work rather than art. An overnight business trip to Shenzhen left just enough time for an hour wandering through Happy Valley, which, despite its cheerful name, possessed the slightly unsettling atmosphere of an abandoned theme park. It felt strangely appropriate to photograph it on black-and-white Kentmere 100 using my Leica M2, allowing the stark architecture and empty spaces to become the real subject rather than the colours themselves.
The Canon immediately makes a good first impression. It’s tiny enough to disappear onto the front of the Leica, yet the focus ring remains easy to grip. It features Canon’s familiar infinity lock, which has a reputation for annoying photographers but quickly becomes second nature once you’ve spent some time with it. Likewise, the front-mounted aperture ring works surprisingly well because the clicks are lighter than the focus action, allowing exposure adjustments without accidentally throwing focus out.
Internally, though, this is unmistakably a product of the 1950s. The six-element design lacks the sophisticated corrections of modern optics, and nobody is going to mistake it for a clinically perfect contemporary lens. Instead, it embraces the sort of imperfections that vintage lens enthusiasts spend their lives romanticising. This lens wasn’t designed to chase laboratory sharpness charts; it was designed to make photographs.
Its age also makes it feel perfectly at home on film. Introduced in 1957, it predates many of the modern photographic conventions we now take for granted, and pairing it with a mechanical Leica feels entirely natural. Ironically, my first experiences with it weren’t on the Leica at all but on my Canon P, until that camera developed a dragging shutter caused by loose stitching on the shutter curtain. The repair proved rather more delicate than these sausage fingers were prepared to attempt, and the whole episode ultimately nudged me towards buying the Leica M2 instead.
One pleasant surprise is how well the M2 accommodates the lens despite lacking dedicated 28mm framelines. By simply using almost the entire viewfinder, the framing becomes remarkably accurate, even if it occasionally requires removing my glasses and pressing my face uncomfortably close to the camera.
Of course, adapting the lens to a modern mirrorless body removes all of those compromises. Mounted on my Nikon Z6 with a simple adapter during a walk through Vienna’s Museum Quarter and Naschmarkt, the Canon suddenly had focus peaking, magnification and a high-resolution sensor revealing every one of its strengths and weaknesses in glorious detail.
Character Over Perfection
If you’re looking for objective perfection, this isn’t the lens for you. In fact, judged purely by modern standards, it’s difficult to argue that it’s particularly good at all.
Let’s begin with the flare. Despite the deeply recessed front element, point this lens anywhere near the sun and it erupts into a psychedelic display of hexagonal ghosts, coloured blobs, veiling flare and collapsing contrast. Some photographers deliberately seek out that behaviour, but I generally prefer keeping the sun somewhere over my shoulder, so most of my examples avoid the full disco light show.
More problematic is the vignetting. Wide open at f/2.8, the corners darken dramatically, as though the world is being viewed through a cardboard tube while driving through an alpine tunnel. Even stopping down doesn’t entirely eliminate it, and if you’re allergic to heavy corner shading, this lens probably isn’t going to become your new favourite.
Sharpness is equally complicated. At maximum aperture, the centre remains respectable, but detail falls away rapidly towards the edges where the image becomes noticeably smeared. Yet somehow, those flaws work together to produce something unexpectedly appealing. The rendering has a painterly quality that modern lenses often sacrifice in pursuit of perfection, and photographs seem to possess a depth and atmosphere that’s difficult to quantify on a test chart.
Stopping the lens down transforms its behaviour. By f/16 the dreamy softness gives way to surprisingly rich detail, while still retaining the gentle microcontrast and subtle rendering that make older optics so enjoyable to use. Tree bark gains texture, colours become vibrant and every corner of the frame rewards closer inspection, even if absolute edge sharpness never quite catches up with contemporary designs.
Looking back through photographs from both Shenzhen and Vienna, the Canon feels remarkably consistent despite the very different subjects. The quiet, almost surreal emptiness of Happy Valley contrasts beautifully with the bustle of Vienna’s flea markets, yet the lens gives both places a cohesive visual identity. Digital files from the Nikon certainly reveal more of the lens’s colour shifts and optical fall-off than film ever does, but they also confirm that the central sharpness is more than adequate while the imperfections remain part of its charm rather than distractions.
Ultimately, that’s what makes the Canon 28mm f/2.8 such an enjoyable lens. It doesn’t pretend to be perfect, nor does it try to compete with modern optics on technical grounds. Instead, it delivers photographs with personality, accepting softness, flare and vignetting as part of the creative process rather than problems to eliminate. Wide open it behaves like an unruly opera singer, full of excess and theatrical flourish. Stop it down and it settles into something far more disciplined, pairing beautifully with the Leica M2 to produce images that feel timeless rather than merely old.
Sometimes character really is worth more than perfection, and this little Canon has plenty of both flaws and personality to keep earning a place in my camera bag.
First Roll Impressions of Ilford Ilfocolor 400 and the Randomness of Film Photography
Welcome to a story about failure. Admittedly, that’s hardly a departure from the usual content around here, but this time the failure isn’t entirely mine. Well, not entirely. Today we’re looking at the wonderfully unpredictable world of colour film photography, where every stage of the process offers another opportunity for disappointment, confusion or outright catastrophe.
Film has a habit of seducing you with promises of beautiful colours, timeless character and authentic imperfections before reminding you that you’re actually just one careless mistake away from destroying an entire roll of memories. It’s a fickle mistress that whispers sweet nothings about dynamic range and grain before gaslighting you into believing you’re simply not good enough to use it properly.
That probably says more about my personality than film itself, but there really is something uniquely masochistic about the medium. A digital photographer can happily expose thousands of images knowing they’ll survive until they reach Lightroom. Film, on the other hand, spends every stage of its existence looking for new and inventive ways to go wrong.
To demonstrate that point, I took two very different rolls on recent trips around Europe. One was the relatively safe option: Fujifilm 400, shot during a brief work visit to Madrid. The other was Ilford Ilfocolor 400 Vintage Tone, a film I’d never used before and one that promised exactly the sort of nostalgic colours that marketing departments know photographers find impossible to resist. As you’ll soon discover, only one of those rolls failed because of the film itself.
Sometimes the Weakest Link is You
My time in Madrid lasted barely thirty-six hours, leaving just enough opportunity for an early morning walk through the city before work. Armed with my Leica M2 and a Nikon 50mm Leica Thread Mount lens, I wandered the streets in a jet-lagged haze, quietly pleased with the photographs I’d managed despite feeling spectacularly uninspired.
The negatives themselves were absolutely fine. Unfortunately, I wasn’t.
The disaster didn’t happen while shooting. I hadn’t loaded the film incorrectly, accidentally opened the camera back or allowed airport X-ray machines to cook the emulsion. Instead, I managed something far more embarrassing during development.
Working inside a changing bag, I successfully loaded the film onto the developing reel before confidently pulling my hands out of the sleeves, only to realise I’d forgotten one tiny detail. The reel had never actually gone inside the developing tank. The moment I removed my arms, light flooded the changing bag and with it disappeared an entire roll of photographs. Feel free to laugh. This is, after all, a celebration of photographic incompetence rather than mastery.
The truth is that film is full of these potential failure points. Loading the camera, exposing correctly, rewinding safely, developing, scanning and editing all present fresh opportunities to ruin perfectly good photographs. Digital photography certainly has its own frustrations, but your memory card doesn’t suddenly self-destruct because it briefly caught sight of daylight before being copied onto your computer.
Of course, not every disappointment can be blamed on the photographer. Some films seem determined to sabotage you all by themselves, and I’d already experienced that on a previous trip to Shanghai with an anonymous rerolled stock that looked considerably better on the box than it ever did on the negatives.
Sadly, history was about to repeat itself.
My daughter had given me a roll of Ilford Ilfocolor 400 Vintage Tone for my birthday, and despite the slightly worrying promise of “vintage tones”, it seemed the perfect companion for an evening photographing Oslo during one of those impossibly long Scandinavian sunsets. Warm golden light, modern architecture and reflections across the water sounded like exactly the sort of scene this film was made for.
The results suggested otherwise.
Vintage Character or Just Bad Film?
The first thing worth pointing out is that Ilford Ilfocolor isn’t actually produced by the same company that manufactures Ilford’s famous black and white films. Harman Technology, the company behind classics like HP5, is entirely separate from Ilford Imaging, which licenses the name for this particular colour stock. That distinction matters because expectations matter.
When you hear the name Ilford, you naturally expect the same consistency and quality that has made their monochrome films legendary. Instead, Ilfocolor immediately raised suspicions before I even scanned the negatives. Rather than the familiar orange mask of conventional colour film, the negatives emerged an alarming shade of green that looked less like photographic material and more like something scraped from the bottom of a neglected biology experiment.
Scanning them didn’t inspire much more confidence. My workflow is deliberately manual, avoiding automated conversion software in favour of scanning the negatives as RAW positive files before inverting them myself in Lightroom. Establishing a neutral white balance, inverting the tone curve, correcting contrast and then adjusting colour provides complete control, although it also involves temporarily living in Lightroom’s own bizarre mirror universe, where moving sliders left often appears to do the opposite of what your brain expects.
Working this way also reveals something interesting about film itself. Every frame behaves slightly differently. Slight overexposure pushes colours towards pink, while underexposed frames drift green. Even after applying identical settings across an entire roll, every photograph still demands individual attention because no two negatives respond quite the same way.
That unpredictability is part of film’s charm, but it also exposes its weaknesses.
After plenty of tweaking, sharpening and colour correction, I eventually coaxed respectable images from the scans, but I couldn’t escape the conclusion that Ilfocolor 400 simply isn’t a particularly good film. It’s extremely grainy, highly contrasty, clips highlights and shadows with alarming enthusiasm and produces colours that become increasingly unstable the further your exposure drifts from perfection.
Ironically, those very flaws also give it a certain personality. Looking through the finished photographs, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen this look somewhere before. The muted colours, heavy grain and cool cast bear a striking resemblance to ORWO Wolfen NC500, another film stock that’s available under several different names. Whether Ilfocolor is simply rebadged Wolfen is open to debate, but the similarities are difficult to ignore.
Even so, I can’t quite bring myself to hate it. Some of the final images possess a gritty, desaturated mood that suits Oslo surprisingly well, even if they arrived there more by accident than design. Whether they’re successful because of the film’s shortcomings or despite them is probably something each viewer will decide for themselves.
Perhaps that’s the real lesson. Film photography is an unpredictable partnership between chemistry, mechanics and human error. Any one of those can betray you at any moment, yet somehow we keep loading another roll, convinced that next time everything will come together perfectly.
Most of the time it doesn’t, but that’s probably why the successes feel so satisfying when they finally arrive.
The Canon Sure Shot Classic is my Favourite Film Point and Shoot. Here’s Why!
Some cameras impress immediately with their specifications. Others earn their reputation through rarity, luxury or eye-watering prices on the second-hand market. The Canon Sure Shot Classic 120 does none of those things, and that’s exactly why it has become one of my favourite film point-and-shoot cameras.
On paper, there’s nothing particularly extraordinary here. The 38-120mm zoom isn’t especially wide or especially long, the maximum aperture of f/4.5 isn’t going to work miracles in low light, and the plastic construction certainly won’t convince anyone they’re holding a premium collector’s item. Yet after using countless compact film cameras over the years, I keep coming back to this one.
Canon’s decision to call it the “Classic” feels surprisingly appropriate. Yes, the silver body and black trim give it a hint of old rangefinder styling, but the real reason it deserves the name is because it captures what makes a classic camera: reliability, simplicity and an ability to disappear into the background while you focus on making photographs.
To see how well it performs in the real world, I took it to two very different locations. The first was the ancient water town of Zhujiajiao near Shanghai, where narrow alleyways and canals provided the perfect setting for some gritty black-and-white photography using pushed Ilford Delta 400. Later, I swapped to Kodak ColorPlus 200 for a gentle walk through suburban Tokyo, giving the camera a chance to show how it handled colour and everyday scenes.
Clever Design Without Getting in the Way
Although the specifications aren’t headline-grabbing, Canon quietly packed plenty of technology into the Sure Shot Classic 120. The lens incorporates an aspherical element to improve sharpness, while the autofocus system uses sophisticated multi-point focusing that simply works without demanding your attention.
That’s really the defining characteristic of this camera. Rather than forcing you to think about autofocus modes, metering systems or exposure calculations, it quietly makes sensible decisions on your behalf. You lift it to your eye, compose your image and press the shutter. Most of the time, that’s all there is to it.
There are still enough manual options to satisfy photographers who like a little control. Various scene modes, spot metering, flash settings and custom memory options are available if you want them, but they’re tucked away rather than dominating the experience. One particularly thoughtful feature is the ability to save flash preferences in the Personal mode, allowing the camera to remember that you prefer shooting without flash instead of forcing you to disable it every single time you power it on.
The physical design also deserves praise. Instead of relying on ageing rubber buttons that have become soft and unreliable over the decades, Canon fitted a tactile rotary dial that makes changing modes quick and satisfying. It feels surprisingly modern, and it reinforces the idea that this is a camera designed to encourage photography rather than menu navigation.
Even the sports mode is more responsive than many competing point-and-shoots from the era. While nobody will be photographing professional sport with this camera, it avoids the frustrating shutter lag that plagues many compact film cameras and makes spontaneous photography much more enjoyable.
Better Image Quality Than You Might Expect
Ultimately, clever engineering only matters if the photographs look good, and fortunately this is where the Canon Sure Shot Classic 120 continues to impress.
The black-and-white images from Zhujiajiao demonstrated that the camera handles contrast and detail remarkably well, even when shooting pushed film in difficult lighting conditions. Switching to Kodak ColorPlus 200 in Tokyo revealed a camera with a refreshingly neutral rendering. It doesn’t exaggerate colours or attempt to create a signature look. Instead, it quietly records scenes much as they appear, allowing the character of the film stock to come through.
Sharpness is more than respectable across most of the frame, even if the corners soften slightly at times. Distortion can appear depending on focal length, although it is generally modest and easily corrected during scanning or editing. Telephoto shots also perform better than expected, with camera shake proving less problematic than the relatively slow maximum aperture might suggest.
One pleasant surprise is the quality of the out-of-focus rendering. Nobody buys a compact zoom expecting creamy medium-format bokeh, but the background blur is often smoother than many competing point-and-shoots. That subtle quality helps subjects stand out naturally, particularly in close-up photographs where harsh or nervous backgrounds can easily overwhelm the image.
Rather than producing spectacular photographs through technical brilliance, the Canon simply delivers consistently good results. It rarely gets in your way, and that’s often more valuable than chasing perfection.
The Toyota Corolla of Film Cameras
The analogy that keeps coming back to me is the Toyota Corolla. Nobody dreams about owning one as a poster car, yet millions of people appreciate them because they start every morning, get the job done and ask very little in return.
That’s exactly how I feel about the Canon Sure Shot Classic 120. It isn’t luxurious like a Contax T2, nor is it surrounded by the hype that inflates the prices of cameras such as the Olympus Mju series. Instead, it occupies a sweet spot where it’s affordable enough to carry everywhere, robust enough to trust while travelling and capable enough that you rarely feel you’re compromising.
Over time it has become one of my most-used film cameras, not because it’s technically the best, but because I know it will reliably produce photographs I’m happy with. Whether it’s accompanying me as a secondary camera on overseas trips or simply documenting everyday life closer to home, it consistently earns its place in my bag.
The best camera is often said to be the one you have with you, but that only works if the camera itself is enjoyable to use. Some compact cameras waste film, miss focus or respond so slowly that they miss the decisive moment entirely. The Canon Sure Shot Classic 120 avoids those frustrations. It offers enough flexibility, enough image quality and enough reliability that I genuinely enjoy taking it out.
No, it isn’t perfect. Then again, neither am I. What it is, however, is a dependable travel companion that quietly captures the moments I want to remember without demanding attention for itself. For an everyday film point-and-shoot, that’s about the highest compliment I can give it, and it’s exactly why it remains my favourite in the collection.
Great Lens, Bad Film: Voigtlander VM Nokton 35mm f/1.5 in Shanghai with IronBridge 800T
I recently found myself in Shanghai and, somehow, my photographic ambitions got completely Shanghai’d. No, I didn’t wake up aboard a cargo ship with a mysterious hangover, a stranger called Tatiana and a rash that required medical attention. My downfall was much less dramatic but arguably far more predictable. I bought a new lens and then made the fatal decision to pair it with a film stock I’d never heard of.
If you’ve spent any time reading this blog, you’ll know I recently picked up a Leica M2. Yes, I’ve become one of those people. The reality, however, is that I’m nowhere near good enough to justify owning it. Then again, I couldn’t justify the price of a genuine Leica 35mm lens either, so I went hunting for something a little more attainable.
That search led me to Shanghai’s famous Xing Guang Photographic Equipment Market, where I found exactly what I wanted: a second-hand Voigtlander Nokton 35mm f/1.5. There were two versions available—a cheaper black model and a slightly more expensive silver brass version. Naturally, I bought the prettier one.
There’s a wonderful Chinese idiom, xin xue lai chao, which literally describes blood rushing to your head. It’s the perfect expression for those moments when logic quietly packs its bags and shiny objects take control. The silver brass Nokton looked absolutely perfect mounted on the Leica M2 and, if we’re being honest, sometimes that’s reason enough.
A Great Lens Meets a Very Bad Idea
To be fair, the lens itself never let me down. The Voigtlander Nokton 35mm f/1.5 belongs to the company’s “Vintage” line, although the name is slightly misleading because the vintage aspect refers more to the styling than the optical performance. Thanks to modern aspherical elements, this isn’t a dreamy character lens with swirly bokeh and soft corners. Instead, it’s impressively sharp while still retaining enough personality to stop images feeling overly clinical.
What impressed me most was just how compact it is. It balances beautifully on the Leica, the build quality feels superb and the focus tab makes manual focusing intuitive. The focus throw is short enough to move from close focus to infinity in one smooth motion, and the lens itself focuses down to half a metre, even if the M2’s rangefinder can’t quite keep up.
In many ways, this is probably a lens that shines just as brightly on a modern mirrorless camera as it does on film. It feels capable of resolving far more detail than most film stocks can actually record. Unfortunately, none of that mattered because, flushed with the excitement of my new purchase, I made another questionable decision.
Walking past a local film shop, I spotted a rerolled stock called Iron Bridge 800T. Judging by the packaging, it appeared to be Kodak Vision3 500T with the remjet layer already removed, promising all the cinematic goodness of CineStill 800T without the hassle of removing remjet yourself during processing. It sounded like the perfect companion for a night on the Bund, photographing the Shanghai skyline across the Huangpu River with glowing city lights and those famous red halations around bright highlights.
As it turned out, the theory was considerably more impressive than the results.
Grain, Halation and Disappointment
The halation certainly arrived, but so did the grain. Lots of grain. Instead of clean, cinematic negatives, I ended up with photographs drenched in teal shadows, pink highlights and enough texture to make sandpaper seem positively smooth. The images definitely had atmosphere, although not quite the atmosphere I’d hoped for.
To be clear, I don’t think the lens deserves any blame here. If anything, it simply exposed every weakness of the film. The Nokton was producing exactly the sort of sharp, modern images I’d bought it for, but the Iron Bridge stock buried those qualities beneath heavy grain and dramatic colour shifts.
A few weeks later I took the same lens to Kenya while visiting the Gazi Female Community Project, where I spent some time planting mangroves before wandering around with a roll of Kodak Gold 200. Mangrove forests aren’t naturally the most photogenic places—unless tangled roots happen to be your artistic obsession—but the difference was immediately obvious. The colours were cleaner, the negatives sharper and the personality of the lens finally began to emerge.
Even photographs of old fishing boats, hardly the world’s most original subject matter, demonstrated what the Voigtlander was capable of. The Shanghai results had suggested the lens lacked something, but the Kenya negatives proved the opposite. It wasn’t the Nokton that had failed me at all.
Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. The following day I loaded a second roll and headed further north along the Bund towards Waibaidu Bridge, fully expecting redemption. What I got instead was remarkable consistency, because the second roll looked every bit as grainy, pink and teal as the first.
When Failure Becomes Part of the Story
At this point, I’m fairly convinced Iron Bridge 800T is simply expired film, whether the packaging admits it or not. The excessive grain, dramatic colour shifts and muddy shadows seem difficult to explain any other way. My chemistry was fresh, I’d processed Kodak Gold successfully afterwards using exactly the same workflow, and I’d even exposed the film conservatively, often treating it as ISO 500 rather than the advertised 800.
For a while I wasn’t even sure these photographs deserved a video or a blog post. They certainly weren’t the showcase I’d imagined for a new lens, and I briefly considered quietly pretending the whole experiment had never happened. Thankfully, time has a habit of softening disappointment.
The more I revisited the negatives, the more those strange pink highlights and blue washes began to grow on me. They’re still technically flawed, but they somehow capture a mood I never intended to create. What initially felt like failure slowly became something closer to accidental artistry.
Of course, if you’re interested in buying a print, I’ll happily explain that they’re an intentional exploration of Shanghai’s electric urban landscape, complete with a lengthy discussion of postmodern semiotics and the dialectical relationship between synthetic colour and twenty-first-century city life. Otherwise, we can simply admit what really happened: I bought a beautiful lens, paired it with questionable film and accidentally created something far more memorable than I’d planned.
Photography rarely goes exactly as expected, but that’s part of what keeps it interesting. Sometimes the failures teach you more than the successes, and sometimes the pictures you almost threw away end up telling the best story of all.
Mark McMahon 