I have three problems that are also not really problems at all.
One is I own a lot of cameras. The second is I like to shoot a lot of different cameras on top of the ones I know suit my photography. The third is that I now run an online camera store (Cameraburo) and decided to film tests many of the cameras that grace its shelves.
It means that while I shot a lot of film in 2023, it was spread over many cameras, including test rolls for cameras which went on Cameraburo.
I shot some rolls on indifferent compacts that are fine but nothing more. I shot more on high-spec SLRs I already know to be excellent like the Contax Aria and the Canon T90. Or on cameras that are in the pile to review for this blog and that I keep wanting to shoot just a few more rolls on. (This might be the cue to put the Zorki 1 on your shopping list.)
Last year I persuaded a bunch of film photography bloggers to end their year talking about three cameras they had used in 2022. The write-ups – the blogs included Down The Road, Camera Go Camera and Photo Thinking – weren’t supposed to be reviews but an end-of-year note about some of the cameras they’d used over the previous 12 months. I published mine while on holiday in New Zealand, just in time to close the year.
This year, I thought I’d repeat it, looking at three cameras I either used for the first this year or reacquainted myself with after a long time.
Canon T50
Canon’s T series was the missing link between SLRs like the AE-1 and the autofocus-era EOS range. They were manual focus – FD-mount like the AE-1 – but housed in chunky plastic bodies embracing motorised film advance. The range reached its apogee in 1986 with the release of the T90, a curvaceous supertanker of an SLR which presaged the smoother styling of the EOS family.
But that’s not the camera I want to talk about.
The T series began in 2023 with a much simpler camera – the T50. The T50 was an almost entirely automated camera with a handful of manual features thrown in almost as an afterthought. Designed to be shot in automatic mode, it’s essentially a point-and-shoot SLR that requires manual focusing.
The T50 is not particularly elegant – it’s a plastic brick with a prism – nor is it quiet. The 1980s-era film advance motor has all the subtlety and volume of a Wagner opera.
But if it’s merely a point-and-shoot, then it’s a point-and-shoot with Canon FD lenses, which certainly aren’t to be sniffed at four decades later. The T50 clanks and grinds and makes a fair amount of noise, but the exposures are bang on.
I got this T50 as part of a huge haul of Canon T cameras and lenses a few years back, but it took this long to put some film through it. It’s a camera I’ll be returning to in 2024 – it’s an absolute hoot to shoot with. But it definitely won’t replace my rangefinders for quiet street snapping.
Canon Sure Shot Max
Canon’s Sure Shot range could be a camera collection in itself.
From the first, eponymous model released in 1979 to the mid-2000s, the Sure Shot family was one of Canon’s runaway successes. It included pioneering designs like the outsize-viewfindered AF-7, the bulky but impressive Zoom XL and the pebble-shaped M.
I’ve bought several models from this impressive range over the years, and picked one of them – the Sure Shot Max – to take away on a long weekend to Istanbul at the end of April.
The Sure Shot Max dates from 1991; it was also known as the Prima 5 in Europe and the Autoboy Mini in Japan. The Sure Shot Max has a fixed focal length – 38mm – and shutter speeds that range from 1/8 to 1/250. It loads, advances and rewinds film automatically. It’s not a spec-busting compact by any stretch of the imagination and purists might point out the slightly plasticky feel, but it has the feel of a camera you should be taking on a summer holiday.
Cameras like this are the autofocus-era’s version of the Olympus Trip 35; perfect for popping in a carry-on bag with a handful of film. Crucially, for me, the Sure Shot Max has a must-have feature for a compact – the ability to turn the flash off.
The Sure Shot Max’s edge vignetting will either be a plus or a penalty – coming from compacts like the Lomo LC-A, this doesn’t bother me at all. The Sure Shot Max’s 38mm lens is sharp and punchy.
If you fancy a compact camera for days out and trips away and don’t need blisteringly high shutter speeds and armour-plated robustness, the Sure Shot Max is an affordable choice.
Cosmic Symbol
The Cosmic Symbol is an altogether simpler camera, but simple is sometimes exactly what you want.
It was a UK export version of the Soviet Smena Symbol, a well-built viewfinder compact designed and built by LOMO in (then) Leningrad and first released in 1973; production didn’t stop until after the USSR’s demise in 1993. More than four million Smena Symbols were made.
Technical and Optical Enterprises (TOE) was a UK importer that brought Soviet-made cameras into the UK, often stripping the cameras down and giving them a technical once-over missing on normal Soviet production lines. The Smena Symbol – alongside the similarly LOMO-made Smena-8 and 135 compacts – were given the branding “Cosmic”.
The Symbol bears some similarity to the Smena 8M but has some important differences. It is much more robustly built and has a larger shutter lever that’s much easier to operate. The T-43 lens is broadly the same 40mm lens as that found on other Smena cameras but has much better coatings – it is definitely sharper and more contrasty. (The lens is so good that UK camera repairer Pierro Pozella made a short run of converted T-43s to shoot on Leica M-mount cameras.)
The Cosmic Symbol is zone-focus, with cartoon used to signify distance settings; some people signify this means it’s a toy camera, but it’s much more capable than cameras in this class. Along with these settings are weather symbols which help you get an accurate exposure without a lightmeter. Just set your film speed on the ring on the front of the lens and this sets the aperture – moving to a different weather symbols changes the shutter speed.
You can of course over-ride these settings (especially if you have a handheld meter to hand) but for an analogue system it works pretty well.
The Smena Symbol is a camera I’ve wanted to pack in the camera bag on trips for a while and I finally brought one to New Zealand with me at the start of the year. I took it on a day-long walk around Wellington’s bays (a brilliant day’s activity if you fancy a 30,000-step schlep to kick away the jetlag) and shot another roll in the sleep seaside village of Paekakariki.
The Smena Symbol is one of the quiet classics of Soviet camera design – dependable, robust, and capable of sparkling results.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
