Canonet QL17 G-III - First Daylight Test
For my daylight testing of my vintage rangefinder, I was lucky to get a nice, sunny day. I had high hopes for this shooting. I went to a park that has a very long bike track, about 7 miles in length, in one of the suburbs of Illinois. I decided I didn’t want to waste the beautiful day so I put my rollerblades on and skated for several miles, all the while filling up a roll of film. I shot on Fuji Super HQ 200.
Unfortunately the photographs turned out to be disappointing. I could blame the camera, of course, but I choose to blame the photographer – myself. A disturbing thing I found out after I developed and scanned the film is a dark horizontal band across each and every frame. In some frames it’s more evident than in others. I hadn’t noticed that in my previous two films but when I checked them more carefully, it turned out they had the same problem. It wasn’t so evident because most pictures were shot in poor light.
I really hope it’s not the camera at fault. A possibility would be the cheap HP scanner that I’m using, though not by choice. I will dig into this.
Anyway, to cut this short, I only have two pictures that I’m fairly happy with. The others are… disastrous. Well, you win some, you lose some.
This first image was taken over one of the bridges spanning a small swamp or bog, inside the huge park. The silhouette leaning on the rail is the photographer – the undersigned.
The second image – and incidentally the last one on the roll – is towards the end of my outing, near a place where fishermen were landing a catch even at this time of the year.
