Five film cameras I’ll never part with

In nearly 25 years using film cameras, I’ve realised there’s no one perfect camera. But there are a few that come pretty close.

A few months ago, a loose collective of film photography blogs I’m a member of decided we wanted to do a project where we all post stories on a similar theme. The theme? Five “dead hand cameras”… or, to put it a little bless bleakly, five cameras that we would never part with. (One camera for each digit in that death grip, it turns out.)

My camera collection is definitely can’t be counted on the fingers of one dead hand, but there are cameras that remain favourites no matter how many other models find their way into your camera bag.

Here are my pick of five cameras that will remain in the Kosmo Foto collection until the end times. (You can see link to other bloggers’ favourites further down the piece.)

The ES II isn’t the best-featured manual-focus SLR of the 1970s. It’s claim to fame was the last in the long-line of Pentax’s Spotmatic family, albeit one with an electronically controlled stepless shutter. Within a few short years this would be commonplace, but when the ES II was rolled out (the last of three ES models) it was pretty revolutionary.

The Spotmatic line was one of Pentax’s lasting gifts to film photography, cameras made not for bullet-dodging war photographers but for enthusiasts who wanted to squeeze as much photography as they could out of a realistic budget.

The ES II is a cinch to use – pop it on “Auto” and the camera will choose the correct shutter speed for the chosen aperture, even if that speed happens to be 1/701 of a second. It’s perfect for shooting on the hoof, for street photography or exploring foreign fields. (Or taking genre-defining album covers, as British photographer Pennie Smith did with one of her Pentax ES IIs.)

The Pentax ES II is the first SLR I think to pack on a trip away. Part of the reason is the simply superb line of SMC (super multi coated) Takumar lenses Pentax made for the ES line and the Spotmatic F in the early 1970s. I don’t think there’s a duff lens in the line-up, but a few of them – the iconic 50/1.4 and the portrait-perfect 105/2.8 – are among the best lenses I own.

Read more:

• Pentax ES II review
• Pentax ES II: The camera that took one of rock’s most iconic photographs
• Pentax ES II review on YouTube

LOMO LC-A (1984)

In 2000, I started my deep dive into proper film photography (and collecting Eastern Bloc cameras) by buying a Praktica MTL 5B SLR and a LOMO LC-A compact. The Praktica taught me the trial-and-error basics of using a manual-focus SLR after my first autofocus attempts, and I eventually sold it to a friend who was travelling around India. But the LOMO? It’s still going strong.

The LOMO LC-A was a prime piece of Soviet copycat consumer tech, a blatant rip-off of Cosina’s zone-focus CX-2. LOMO’s designers couldn’t quite work out the CX-2’s twisting frontplate and offered a much simpler sliding latch, but in most other respects it was essentially the same camera. It could have been just another curious Soviet camera had a bunch of Austrian art students not become obsessed with it in the early 1990s and created the Lomography movement around it.

The LC-A might have been the camera that tipped me over the edge from sometime-photographer into full-time film camera nerd. Even today, if I want to give my photographic creative juices a refresh, the LC-A is the camera I reach for. Loaded with expired film or slide film (for cross processing) the LC-A creates super-saturated pictures with characteristic vignetting, riotous colours and ethereal blur.

Read more:

• LOMO LC-A review
• The LOMO LC-A family

Kiev-60 (1984)

The East German Pentacon Six was a mainstay of Eastern Bloc press and studio photographers which came with a line of simply stunning Carl Zeiss Jena lenses. It also had a problematic film advance system that kept camera repairers on overtime.

In Soviet-era Ukraine, the Arsenal planet decided to come up with a fellow camera which would share the same lens mount. The Kiev-6C, released in 1971, was a bulky, bicep-building SLR on a similar scale to Pentax’s mighty 67. In the 1980s, Arsenal tweaked the design, adding a TTL metered prism as standard and doing away with the ability to shoot 220 film. The Kiev-60 was released in 1984 and remained in production until at least 1999.

I picked up my first Kiev-60 a few years later, via a Dutch importer called Roskam Optics who tweaked a lot of the late-production Kievs’ quibbles (glossy interior paint, wonky frame advance, dodgy meters) and gave it a three-year warranty. I took this hefty Kiev on a trip to Cuba soon after and was blown away by the quality (the Ukrainian-built lenses are almost as good as the CZJ ones for the Pentacon).

Though the Kiev-60 has some drawbacks as a travel camera (weighing in at 2kg with lens and metering head, it doesn’t leave much room for other gear in cabin baggage) it’s surprisingly portable if you don’t mind carrying around a heavier camera. This was the camera that opened up the world of medium format to me. I’ve even shot press photos for a couple of musicians on it; US singer-songwriter Josh Rouse (for 2006’s ‘Subtitulo’) and Joker’s Daughter, the first artist signed to Danger Mouse’s record label.

I have to say Hans Roskam’s upgrades were value for money, too – more than 20 years later, that Kiev-60 is still working like a dream. A very heavy dream, mind.

Read the ‘five camera’ posts from other blogs: 

• Alex Luyckx
• Aperture Preview
• Austerity Photo
• Camera Go Camera
• Down The Road
• Mike Eckman
• Photo Thinking

Nikon F100 (1999)

I leave most of my autofocus film photography to when I’m using compacts – and I have a lot of autofocus compacts.

But when it comes to autofocus SLRs, the Nikon F100 is the one I would reach for nine times out of 10. Released in 1999, the F100 was the picture-perfect example of a prosumer camera – one with 90% of the features a professional camera would have minus the weatherproofing and armour-plated body.

The F100 can be seen as a kind of half-way house between the earlier F5 and the F6 which arrived in the mid-2000s. It has the by-now-standard matrix metering, which had been introduced in the early 1980s. This means very accurate exposure. There is spot metering as well as centre-weighted and a burst mode for those wanting to live their 1990s photojournalist fantasies.

I bought my F100 back in 2006 for a project shooting bands at soundcheck; on dark stages with low-light and Kodak Tri-X pushed to 6400, it absolutely excelled. It’s also a great travel camera; while not as robust as the F5 or F6, it’s a solid camera and shrugs off dust and has a reassuring weight without being a back killer. You could travel the world with this thing for a year and never think about another camera.

Read more:

• Nikon F100 review

Voigtlander Bessaflex TM (2003)

In 2003, Cosina released a camera that was at once 10 years ahead of its time and 20 years out of date.

Having bought the hailed Voigtlander name some years earlier and with a string of successful film rangefinders behind them, Cosina then had the bright idea of resurrecting one of their 1980s SLRs – the CT-1 Super to be exact – as the basis of a new range of SLRs for the 2000s. The basic camera would be the same – the Bessaflex – but Cosina would offer it in a range of lens mounts (Nikon F, Canon FD, Olympus OM) for simple stop-down shooting; a new body that could be used if you had a bunch of legacy lenses.

In the end, only one model was actually released – the Bessaflex TM (Thread Mount) for M42 lenses.

I once had three of these cameras – two of the black versions based on the Nikon F, and one of the silver versions inspired by the Topcon Super D. Much of my photography in the mid-2000s – and several foreign trips – involved at least one Bessaflex in the camera bag. The Bessaflex is light, easy to use, takes widely available button cells for its meter and has a ridiculously bright viewfinder. You can forgive the slightly plasticky construction (it’s noticeably lighter than the metal-heavy M42 SLRs of the 1970s) and the fact that the stop-down operation darkens the viewfinder when the meter is activated.

Had the Bessaflex been launched in 2013 instead of 2003, it may have been a much greater success. I’m glad I kept hold of one.

Read more:

• Voigtlander Bessaflex TM review
• The little SLR that was a decade too early

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Stephen Dowling

Editor at Kosmo Foto

I’m Kosmo Foto’s founder and editor.

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.

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