I recently had the privilege of shooting 3 rolls of film with a venerable old Canon F-1 manual SLR camera. I said “privilege” for 3 reasons: first, it was lent to me by a gentleman at the office (through this I wish to thank him again for the opportunity); second, these cameras were top of the line back in their time and shooting with one of these brings back a lot of the melancholy of film; third, this particular F-1 was almost in mint condition. There were a few minor scratches on its body but for the most part it looked like it had just been pulled out of the box.

Having said this, I should mention that this isn’t quite a classic review of the camera, but rather an “ode” of appreciation to a beautiful piece of precision machinery.

Unfortunately the owner didn’t know what to tell me about the approximate date when he bought the Canon F-1 but I deduced the model must have been made after 1976, perhaps some time during the 80’s. The original F-1 was released in 1971 but in 1976 a series of improvements were made, and the camera that I shot with was one of these. Among these improvements is the ability to shoot at ISO 3200.

The Canon F-1 manual SLR uses FD lenses and this copy had a very nice Canon 50mm f/1.4 prime. Both the camera and the lens are built like tanks, from aluminum. There’s a very solid, almost military, feel to them. At the same time I handled them like they were my own.

This camera has all the features you might require from a manual camera, including speeds between Bulb and 1/2000s (although 1/4000 like on the Nikon FM-2 would have been nice), multi-exposures, DOF preview, mirror-lockup and metering. The metering cell requires a battery and luckily it takes the very common 625A that my Canonet also uses.

In all I shot 3 rolls, two Fuji Superia 400 and one Ilford HP5 400. I haven’t received the Ilford back from the processing center yet but the other 2 films were a mixed bag in quality. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very impressed by the results from these two rolls. I don’t want to blame it on the camera/lens because I’ve obtained similar results from the Canonet, so I must conclude that the most likely suspects must be one of the following: either the cheap film, or the cheap developing process, or the scanner that I used for scanning the negatives. I really hope it’s not the scanner since it’s a brand new Canon, which although far from professional, should nonetheless be able to cope with scanning a damn negative. I didn’t mention the photographer in this list of culprits but there is a chance that I simply don’t know how to use a manual camera, though that is a bit far fetched. When you get down to the principle of the thing, shooting a manual SLR isn’t much different from shooting a digital SLR.

To conclude, I’ve started to get the feeling that perhaps film is finally on its way out. There is simply no comparison between the scans from the negatives from a professional camera from a bygone area and the digital images from the sensor of my modern Canon 30D. Film remains a niche product and unfortunately I believe that it will become more and more expensive as time goes by. It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point in the future only wealthy people will afford to buy and process film. It’s only a matter of time before that happens. Until then I will keep enjoying taking photographs with these ancient manual cameras, even if the final image is far from spectacular, quality-wise.

I will be posting the photos I took with the Canon F-1 very soon and hopefully the Ilford will turn out to be better. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: The Canon F-1 instruction manual can be found in PDF format here: Canon F-1 instruction manual

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Canon F-1, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.