The humble film camera is making a comeback! Not really, but there are a few weird and wonderful film cameras out there that are defying the digital tide and becoming more popular. Andrew Fildes counts down his top 10.
There’s a rule in fashion that it ain’t fashionable if everyone is doing it. Now everyone has a digital camera (even if it’s only in their iPhone) and film is making a comeback – at least with a growing band of mostly young, arty and fashion-conscious photographers.
THE camera to have right now is not a little, pink compact digital. No, it’s a seventies chrome and black leather rangefinder. A compact one swinging from your wrist. Nothing too difficult mind you – it has to have a meter and an auto mode. And if it’s had a leather transplant and now comes in red snakeskin, so much the better. Why? Because you look clever, going against the flow. And they really are quite nice. (And no-one can check your images on the spot so no-one knows they’re rubbish!)
So, what are the 10 most fashionable retro cameras of all time? Let’s count them down, starting at number 10...
10 PINHOLE
It would be higher up the list but a lot of pinholers are heavy duty geeks who engage in endless conversations about the focal length of hand-made pinholes. Also children make them out of Milo tins. Eschew that. Making your own is a bit DIY and you wouldn’t be caught dead in a hardware store, right? Get a nice, wooden Zero Image 135, all rosewood and brass, for a couple of hundred. Then you can enthuse about the dreamy lensless images with eternal focus – retro, artistic and romantic.
The Zero Image 135 zone plate camera is made of rosewood and brass. Darwin could have used something like this.
09 HALF FRAME
Typically an Olympus Pen EE or Canon Demi. 72 shots on a film and it slips into your pocket. Neat. I really love the old Ricoh and Fujica Drive wind up half-frame cameras – absolute little gems and the Ricoh Auto-Half models (pictured) are quite amazing. I always tell people that I had one many, many years ago and it was stolen from me in Morocco. It happens to be true – I was a trendsetter, once.
The original 1963 Ricoh Auto Half. Later models were much prettier. The last had fast f1.7 lenses! (Photo by Hiyotada.)
08 HOLGA OR DIANA
120 film is the most expensive and awkward to use of the common film formats, so... lets stick it in a plastic toy! It’s like turning up to a major social event in diamonds and Chanel but driving a Morris Minor. Trendy for ages and the fashion shows no sign of abating. In fact, Lomo has recognized the fashion accessory potential of the marque and released new gold editions! And you can buy them at the gallery shop in the national Gallery of Victoria so they must be arty. If you actually want the image style you’d probably be better off with a Lightroom or Aperture pre-set but this is about what you are seen to use, not the results.
The Diana, the original and the trendiest. A plastic toy made for teenage girls in the 1960s. There are a lot of clones but they all look more or less like this. The Holga has become an industry with a lot of recent variants – pinhole, panoramic, 35mm, whatever but true artists prefer the princess. So much so that it’s gone back into production. (Photo by Jim Newberry.)
07 POLAROID
Nothing says, ‘I don’t care’ like a Polaroid. Especially an SX-70. You have to hunt for the film, it costs a fortune and then you get mildly tanked at a club and rip through 5 packs of Impossible Project film in half an hour. Everyone thinks it’s marvelous, you’re marvelous and then you live on baked beans for a week waiting for more packs to arrive in the post. 
The best of the Polaroids because it looks good and folds flat. The first to use the ‘spit the chip’ print film. A later version with sonic focussing (Sonar) was the first SLR with AF. (Photo by Junkyard Kahrs.)
06 MINIATURE DIGITAL
I know we said this was about fashionable film cameras, but these digitals are so weird we had to include them. A Rollei MiniDigi or Minox Leica M3 miniature replica is perfect, a real eye-catcher and almost impossible to use sensibly. Failing that, the Harinizumi (Hedgehog) is a cult camera with inconsistent supply and results – hard to get and tricky to use. But nothing else looks like it. Announce that they are the closest thing yet to digital Lomography, with a sneer if you can.
The tiny Rollei Mini Digi. I’ve never used mine without someone stopping to check it out.
05 SOMETHING RUSSIAN
I’d favour a FED myself but a working spring-wind Leningrad would really catch the eye. The FED has the story – a camera named after the founder of the KGB secret police (Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsy) has to be noteworthy. Looks like a Leica but various versions are available – some now have Russian-theme graphic covers. Available fully refurbished from http://australia.shop.lomography.com/.
The FED 2 Leica copy takes all Leica screw-mount lenses and looks pretty clever.
04 OLD LEICA
This is about appearances not fine points so any screw mount Leica with a collapsible lens will do just fine. A nice working IIIc with an 50mm Elmar is good. It’ll be battered – they’re between 75 and 50 years old depending on model. But it is living history.
A Leica IIIc from the 1940s – the wartime model. What could be more fashionable than that? Solid, heavy and runs like a Swiss watch.
03 FUJIPET
This one meets several criteria for cool: it’s almost unknown because it wasn’t sold outside Japan; it’s a 120 film toy camera and comes in colours; it’s very hard to find and quite expensive when you do; it looks seriously weird. The model to get is the first – known as the ‘Thunderbird’ because of the shape of the huge viewfinder on top. Later models and the 35mm version are nice but nothing like this. It was a domestic Japanese Diana-style camera although of better quality. Perhaps the most fashionable toy camera.
The Fujipet is rare, expensive, slightly weird and very fashionable.
02 CANONET QL 17 GIII
The very best of the Canonets. A fast f1.7 40mm lens which produces very sharp images in a nice, little compact body. About a million were made. Earlier less-compact Canonets like the QL 17, 19, 25 and 28 are also quite acceptable fashion statements. They tend to use 625-format 1.35V mercury batteries and the modern alkaline versions are 1.5V which causes metering problems. Use a Wein 625 battery.
Canon’s Canonet QL 17 GIII. A super-compact rangefinder with a terrific lens.
01 OLYMPUS TRIP 35
Neat, tiny and dead simple. Solar powered – no battery required (several of the others use outlawed mercury batteries and replacements that work properly are hard to find). The light meter cell around the lens produces enough power to operate the auto aperture system. Nice sharp little 40mm f2.8 lens, two speeds and manual aperture settings for flash. This one is a legend – Olympus made over 5 million of them between 1967-88. They were perfect for family groups and tourism. Common as…but they still sell for over $100 if they are clean, unmarked and working well. A couple of years ago you could have got one for $20 – now you’ll spend more for a genuine Olympus UV filter (43.5mm!), cap or lens hood.Colour leathers available from http://aki-asahi.com/store and a really easy job. Black ones are rare and very cool.
The Olympus Trip 35 is solar powered and offers just two shutter speeds, 1/40s and 1/200s! The Trip was produced from 1967 to 1988.
Have we forgotten your favourite camera? If so, tell us about it in the comments section below.