I have acquired a Canon

I know what you are thinking. Spike, WTF? Or indeed, what the fuck? Why one earth would you purchase one of these “dull, black, bland, boring pieces of flappy mirror equipped, crappy sensor lumps of shit”*?

Be still your beating heart dear reader and re-holster that vitriol; because although it is a Canon, it is a 1960s Canon; and I haven’t bought it, I have it on loan from my friend Tic so I can run a film through it and evaluate it for him.

And here it is:

It’s a Canon 7s with a 50mm F1.4 lens. He was chasing after the much more expensive F0.95 version; but I managed to talk him down to something more sensible (which is unlike me, because normally I enjoy encouraging others to spend as much as possible in a feeble attempt to self-justify my own occasional profligacy).

It’s a chunk of a thing with not quite the whimsical elegance of my older Leica IIIC:

But it has a better rangefinder, and sports a battery compartment for the purposes of powering a light meter whose needle seems a little more reticent than it should be to whizz across the scale and suggest exposure settings.

During a break in the clouds today I decided to mount the lens on my Olympus; just to check that it could actually focus and produce an image. She who must be obeyed had purchased some flowers yesterday and they were not quite dead yet; so they were to be the subject matter. I placed a stool in the garden and went indoors to collect the flowers. When I returned, the cat had taken up residence; so the first shot was the obligatory cat photo:

Shooed away the cat and then took a shot of the flowers:

I think the lens is OK. So when it eventually stops raining I will take the camera out and shoot a roll of film; although I will probably put some black tape over the word “Canon”; don’t want to destroy my already minimal reputation.

*DPreview, May 2015

Comments 🔗

2015-06-19 | Clive says

And there I was thinking that you’d managed to acquire some small piece of field artillery, the kind that some octogenarian with a handlebar moustache likes to use to start the annual sailing regatta down at the yacht club… and which on previous occasions managed to sink the Brigadier’s “judges’ skiff”, take out both door windows of the vicar’s wife’s Mini, not to mention scare so much crap out of the local gulls that a large dollop managed to land in a cup of tea being consumed by the vicar himself…

Now that would have been worth a “shot” or two…

Oh well. Next time maybe.