Camera Love Is All Around Us

Working, or indeed playing with vintage cameras can be fun. Sometimes difficult, occasionally frustrating, but fun nevertheless. It certainly needs to be, it's an expensive business putting a film through a camera, and with no guarantee of good results.

Of course if it's inexpensive photography you're after, digital is without peer, even phone cameras deliver great results if you can cope with the background software messing with your image. If it has to be film though, a big chunky SLR with high quality interchangeable lenses will give a more consistent result, and this is where most people seem to be picking their film photography back up again. For myself, I don't recall ever really desiring a high-spec SLR, digital or analogue, and here's why...

It's that fun thing again. Fun and convenience. Because I do a fair bit of walking, and fun for me means having a camera to hand at all times when out and about. Throughout much of my youth that meant whatever fixed or autofocus point and shoot I was planning to lose at a gig or party that week. When I finally got round to replacing my precious but infrequently used Praktica SLR with a decent digital camera, I went straight for the Micro Four Thirds format. Almost all the flexibility of a DSLR but without the off-putting bulk. Size you see, whilst not everything, is pretty crucial to me, and I know that if I'd gone for a big chunky DSLR or zoom equipped autofocus, I simply wouldn't have taken it out and used it as much.

So when I started looking for a vintage film camera to reignite my interest in photography, early Leica Rangefinders and their many Barnack style clones particularly appealed to me. Whilst the FED-1 (above, squeezed into a slightly too small Leica case) is a heavy chunk of a camera, its great design strength is its compact size, particularly with the standard collapsible lens which means it fits snugly into a jacket pocket.

The Baldessa is also quite a small camera, another Rangefinder so lacking the unsightly (to me!) bulge on the top plate that most SLR's are saddled with. But because of the (very good) fixed lens it's never going to be the slim pocketable camera that the FED is. Nevertheless, it slips with ease into a shoulder bag alongside the essential travel items of reading glasses, paperback book, and beer tokens, so I've taken to travelling with one or the other at all times now, which is how it should be. The photos shown here were taken on the Baldessa, not on specific trips out for photography, just as and when I saw a subject that interested me such as the iconic Grosvenor House in Corby Town (above).