I bought a Pentax camera when I was in my teens, my first real camera that wasn't my father's, and it got stolen when I moved to Vancouver. It still had the film in it from the last half of my cross Canada road trip. "Welcome to Vancouver, we will steal your shit." That camera was a Pentax SF10. This camera is the one I replaced that one with. It's a Pentax SF-1. I traded this camera to my father for his old Spotmatic that I learned on. And later he gave it back to me when they got a wee Canon point and shoot that, for all practical purposes, was a better camera. It was a great little camera, relatively high end at the time.
It's one of the cameras I was going to drive one more time before selling/passing on.
I took two pictures with it today and it said, "Yeah, I'm done." No more pictures. Wouldn't advance. Wouldn't rewind. It made it easy to toss it in the garbage. The lenses go on eBay next week with $1 starting bids. The hardest one for me to sell is a Tokina 17mm that was the most expensive thing I ever bought once. Relatively speaking. It was $300 or so and a magical thing. I had never looked through a lens so wide. It took some great photos.
The film experiment continues tomorrow. Tomorrow's camera is a Yashica T3 with a Zeiss lens. It's not that different than what Fred Herzog shot with. It might even be better. It's probably better. Fred is a pretty amazing photographer without considering what he shot with, but when you realize he shot with a kid's toy camera it gets even more amazing.
The Yashica is an amazing little camera. I've already promised it to a good friend. She has reluctantly accepted it, though I haven't made good on the threat to give it to her yet. She understands Herzog and quirky things but that doesn't help in this case because it's hard to get over how crappy this little camera looks. But, Zeiss.
Or maybe tomorrow it won't wind film and I'll be chucking it in the trash too. Don't know.
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