I am a reasonably current kind of guy even at my advanced age (according to at least some younger people I am an old man although I confess to feeling younger these days than I have in a while) and I generally spend many of my waking hours each day near a lap top or a smart phone plugged into the world wide web. I am also one of the few people I know my age with an active Facebook page. So when Hurricane Katrina wiped out all of my worldly possessions back in 2005, including my cameras and associated equipment, I naturally thought it expedient to enter the new and exciting world of digital photography that I had been hearing about but otherwise ignoring for years.
Two DSLR’s, one upscale digital point and shoot, and a couple years later I decided I really didn’t like digital photography and headed back into the amazing and familiar world of film. This trip so far seems fraught with a multitude of twists and turns and not nearly as simple as I thought it was going to be. Thus I find myself here narrating my experiences for my own and hopefully your amusement and enlightenment.
My first stop on the way back to film was quite naturally the world wide web, where I began to research all things photographic and discovered much to my chagrin that there were almost no film cameras being manufactured any more. While I frittered away my life and time over the last 30 years with such trivialities as children and career, all the “Greats” of the film camera world I once knew and loved simply vanished one by one.
A little background may be in order here. I started out my photographic life as a nine year old boy living in South Florida who had just received a Kodak Brownie Bullet 127 roll film camera for his birthday. I shot and killed a great many rolls of film with that little camera until I was about 19 years old and finally scrapped up enough money to buy my first 35mm. That was a grand and glorious day, so much so that I don’t really know what ever happened to that little Brownie. I think (hope) I gave it to someone who was camera-less although by that time the world of casual photography had been almost completely taken over by the 126 Instamatics. The original Instamatics weren’t too bad but they kept making them smaller and cheaper until they were impossible to hold properly. They took really poor quality pictures because the negatives were so tiny. The only thing worse was the “Disc Cameras” of the 1980’s that took pictures on something that looked like a View Master disc whose negatives were even smaller.
In any case, my first 35mm was an Olympus 35RC rangefinder. This was a great little camera that came with full manual or shutter priority automatic exposure control and a very sharp and fast 42mm, F1.7 Zuiko lens. I shot and killed many more rolls of film with that rangefinder for nearly another decade of my life before venturing into the next photographic chapter of my life.
Late in the 1970’s I arrived in my late 20’s and I decided I needed a 35mm SLR to compliment my now steadily increasing income and decreasing hair. My pick was quite naturally an Olympus OM-1N. This beautiful product of the camera master’s art was a fully mechanical all manual SLR that came to me with a 50mm, F1.4, incredibly sharp Zuiko lens. Over the next year or two that first lens was joined by a 135mm short telephoto and a 35mm wide angle lens along with a selection of filters and several other gadgets including a side bracket to support a huge Vivitar thyristor flash unit that was guaranteed to fry every exposed cornea within a 30’ radius and provide suitable photographic illumination out to 75’. As far as I was concerned by the time I was 30 I had all the camera and gear I would ever need unless I decided to go pro or delve into medium format photography.
Later on I would get a 35mm, fully automatic, auto-focus, Canon Sure Shot point & shoot camera to round out my equipment bag and after another decade passed I would be the grateful recipient of a free but well used Rolliflex TLR.
Fast-forward to August 29th, 2005; the day after Hurricane Katrina passed through my community leaving my home destroyed and all my possessions under 14’ of sea water and swamp mud. No more cameras.
For the next year or two I was too busy with relocating and rebuilding my life to worry about cameras but eventually, after replacing clothes and houses and a few other more important things I turned to the task of replacing my camera. My research on the world wide web led me to believe that the days of film cameras was over so with all due respect and more than a little nostalgia for my first love (film photography) I happily headed off into the bright and shiny new world of digital photography.
I hate the shutter. For nearly 50 years I had pressed the shutter button on my camera and it took a picture. Sometimes the picture came out the way I wanted. Sometimes it did not, but when I pushed the shutter button it took the picture. Now I pushed the shutter button and sometimes it took a picture. Sometimes it did not. This was not acceptable. Not only that, but all the lenses were terribly slow compared to my old Zuiko lenses. And, even if you spent the big bucks to get a fast lens the auto-focus would hardly work in low light situations anyway.
Back to where I started a few paragraphs back. Two DSLR’s, one upscale digital point and shoot, and a couple years later I finally decided I had had it with digital photography and once again started looking for a replacement for my old 35mm SLR. Now of course there were even fewer such dinosaurs being manufactured. In fact, the only choices for a new camera on the affordable side of a $4000 to $5000 professional version, was the Nikon FM-10, the Vivitar 3800, or the Promaster 2500PK. I later discovered that all three of these were being built by Cosina and that they were all nearly identical. My pick was the Promaster simply because it was available at my local camera store and I like to see and touch things before I buy them. Besides, the Promaster and the Vivitar both took Pentax K type lenses and both the DSLR’s we had were Pantax so I reasoned that there would be some degree of interchangeability between all the cameras that would not exist with the Nikon. My all manual Promaster 35mm SLR cost $150 and came with a K-mount 50mm 1.7 lens.
This was a perfect camera for my purposes. In spite of my misgivings about digital photography I still wasn’t sure that film photography would endure much longer so I didn’t want to invest a lot of money in a dying technology and I still had a couple thousand dollars worth of digital cameras available with auto-focus and fancy zoom capabilities.
Those were busy times so photography was not a main occupation. It took me several months to get around to actually using the new camera. About 6 months after the warranty had expired I discovered that my new and apparently very cheaply made plastic camera was even more cheaply made than I first thought when the shutter jammed up and the film advance wouldn’t advance. Upon further investigation I found out my $150 camera was going to cost $130 to have repaired and a replacement would now cost me $160. Neither alternative seemed especially attractive or wise to me. After taking the camera apart and succeeding only in further insuring that it would never take pictures again I considered my options.
The only thing I had left from my misguided venture back into the world of film photography was a pretty decent 50mm, F1.7 lens so with than in mind I started looking into purchasing a used Pentax K-1000 to go with the lens. For those of you who are not familiar with the K-1000, it is the Sherman tank of 35mm manual SLR’s that Pentax had manufactured in one form or another for decades. My wife had one before Hurricane Katrina took it along with everything else and it was simply the most solidly built piece of photographic equipment I had ever run across. Surely I thought if one of the millions of these in good shape could be had it for a reasonable price it would be an investment that would last for years.
A funny thing happened on the way to finding my Pentax K-1000. While looking online at “KEH” a used camera outlet that claims to have the largest selection of used film cameras I ran across a used Promaster 2000PK body. It was supposed to be in excellent condition and came with a 60 day warranty; all for only $29 plus shipping. I already had a lens and I considered that I sometimes spend more than $29 for a good lunch so how could I lose on that deal.
About a week later, with my new used camera in hand I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the older Promaster 2000 seemed to actually be put together much better than the newer model 2500PK I had originally bought. It did not have the PC socket for the flash (although it did have a hot shoe) or the multiple exposure button the later version had but I figured I could live without those in exchange for a camera that might last long enough to shoot more than one or two rolls of film.
I shot a test roll and had it processed to determine two things before I went any further or invested any more time or money into film photography. First, did my $29 used camera function as it should, and second, were my aging eyes still good enough to focus the fully manual camera properly, after all, for the past couple years I had used nothing but an auto-focus digital camera. My confidence in myself was almost as shaky as my confidence in my $29 camera. Both of us came through with flying colors however.
With my initial tests finished I started shooting film again and looking for the next addition to my camera bag.
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