I went to town to see Stephen Dowling of Kosmo Foto (google it) with his pop-up shop at the Aperture film processing shop.
Stephen was doing a brisk trade selling relatively cheap second-hand film cameras.
As someone once said, with film cameras, the technology is in the film. So as long as the lens is high enough quality, most cameras will do a reasonable job – even little compact point-and-shoot cameras from thirty years ago.
Here’s the Aperture shop on 27 Rathbone Place, off Tottenham Court Road in London.
I had never been to Aperture before and didn’t know it existed until I read the notice on Kosmo Foto.
I don’t know what relationship Stephen has with Aperture but it occurs to me that it may be a nice symbiotic arrangement.
If his blog brings people to the shop, then those people are likely to use Aperture for their processing needs.
Do You Repair Cameras
I took the opportunity to ask one of the staff whether they repair cameras – and they do at their sister shop.
So I took a walk there. The roads around Rathbone Place are full of cafes, restaurants, and little independent shops. And there is a really atmosphere in those streets, just a stone’s throw from Tottenham Court Road.
London is like that, with a very particular feel in an area. Walk a few streets and it is something else again.
So at the repair shop – where they also sell cameras – I described the fault with my Nikon F801s, a camera I boughton eBay a while ago.
If there is an error, it is surely not worth spending much money on to repair, but it might be a simple job of replacing a spring.
For my adventures in film, and after trying several film cameras I settled on a Nikon F80. It has what I need, as I described in this article on Why I chose the Nikon F80 – being autofocus, auto exposure, and a good size viewfinder.
That said, I also have an Olympus XA-2 and a Minolta Freedom Escort – both of which are tiny.
The XA-2 is zone focussing, which presents its own problems. I also have a Nikon FE that I have had for years. But the others are recent purchases and the fact is that older film cameras cost a fraction of what they cost when new. If you think you like film, this is a good time to acquire the equipment.
Meet Joe Evans
After all of that I decided I didn’t want to face changing tube lines, so I walked back to Bond Street station to get the tube home.
Oxford Street was crowded, really crowded.
I was thinking how amazing the variety of faces is. You would think will eight billion of us that there would be a lot of repetition. But no.
In a walkway leading to the platform, Joe Evans (I asked his name) was singing and playing and he has a nice voice. So I asked him if it was OK to take his photo and he was happy for me to do it.
The only problem was that I had a 16mm lens on my Canon R6, which is a full frame camera. So here are the results and they have a kind of dynamic that only a short focal length lens can achieve.
A second ‘problem’ is that Joe had lights set up on the ground around him, reflecting onto him, and they kept changing colour, so he is lit with pink in one shot and green in another, and so on.
If we cross paths again I shall photograph him when I have a more suitable focal length lens on the camera.
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