Hashtag Retrodigital

Old toys and new toys

Last Tuesday marked the pre-order release date for the Rollei 35AF a reinvention of the classic camera that Rollei debuted at Photokina in 1966. 

The team behind the revamp have recreated the beautiful little camera, rebuilding it from the ground up. The key thing for me is that aside from being beautiful they’ve added autofocus (the original’s zone focus system is the thing that has stopped me owning one).

Also the black version is to die for.

After following the project for years, and waiting months for the pre-orders to open up, Tuesday was also the day when I didn’t order one. There are two main reasons:

The first is that I just don’t have the near £800 I need to buy one, (I don’t have the £600 I’d ball-parked in my head either, but that would have been an easier hurdle to jump).

The second  is that I haven’t shot much film of recent. I can’t remember the last time I went 6 months without sending something to a lab.

For the uninitiated – I really like shooting film. I take pleasure in the action of doing it, I enjoy the resultant images and I enjoy the anticipatory rollercoaster that comes with using it. I enjoy the serendipity of the happy accident as much as I enjoy occasional deliberate success. My experience of it is good and I like it.

I say that so that my motives for the rest of this post are in context. 

It’s getting pricey

I do already own an autofocus 35mm compact with a 35mm f/2.8 lens, it’s my Olympus MJU and I’ve recently developed the film that’s been in it for over a year. Generally shooting film has been relegated to actual holidays because both my time and my money have been otherwise engaged. I’ve been struggling to see the ROI.

I can remember (this is typed in an old man voice), when I could buy three rolls of one of my favourite films, Fujifilm Superia Extra on 35mm for £12.99, now a single roll will cost you £15.

These price increases are important and are probably necessary. I’d rather pay more for a film now than see it discontinued in a year. The industry needs our support if our ecosystem is going to continue to grow and occasionally flower.

With that in mind, I could do with keeping my costs down, so I can continue to support other parts of the industry. I’ve started shooting cheaper film and using cheaper scan specs when I send film to a lab. Gone are the days of shooting £150 worth of Portra 400 and paying £120 to find out if they’re any good.

I’ve really grown as a person. 

I’m also going to chill out on re-spooled and alternative film stocks. If I’m honest with myself, I like the results I get from in-date colour negative film that’s new from the manufacturer and used roughly as intended. Recent dalliances with Alienfilm’s Aeronega and Ilfocolour 400 have left me wanting, and given the costs involved in both time and money, nice new film seems like a sensible results-focused option.

Not buying any more film cameras seems like a good cost saving too.

Solutions

I would love to be able to support Rollei in this exercise, I don’t doubt that the camera is priced as it should be. I’d like to be able to support Pentax on their adventure too, but I have no use for a £500 half-frame camera with zone focus, (I’m really bad at zone focusing).

Not buying cameras is one way to save money, not wasting film is another. Looking at recent rolls of negatives, particularly those from the Olympus has drawn my attention to the amount of crap that I shoot. I don’t necessarily mean poor subject choice, but I keep trying to make images in bad light, indoors or at night, or when I’m loaded with film that I know won’t produce good results.

I have to acknowledge that sometimes, just sometimes, I take a film camera loaded with a wholly inappropriate film stock into a situation where it will be functionally useless. I do this rather than take one of my R5 bodies which would work much better.

Late last year I broke the habit and took an R5 to a gig. I was there to catch up with friends and I took the R5 because I wanted to play with my then new Canon RF 28mm f/2.8. Actually getting pictures back, and in a timely manner, was a bit of a revelation for me.

I edited them on the train home.

The thing is, as I mentioned before – I like shooting film – In many ways I prefer it. The drive to shoot film comes from a need to use something a bit different to my work cameras, to not be confronted with my image immediately, to have a different experience when I’m making the image, and to get a result that looks more removed from reality.

My Canon 5D ‘Classic’ isn’t the same as shooting my Canon EOS 1, but the experience of working around its foibles is reminiscent of using a film camera. Images get noisy quickly as you climb the ISO scale, the colours are lovely, the files are small and nice to work with. I’ve switched off autodisplay on the back screen so I can get it as close to my EOS 1 as I can. 

Since purchasing the camera in 2022, I’ve taken over 1800 pictures with it, which equates to over fifty rolls worth of exposures, that’s  £1000 worth of Portra 400, and another £800 to see how bad the keep rate would be. (Hmm… I’ve saved enough to pay for the Rollei…)

The point with the 5D is that it does something my phone doesn’t, mimics the film cameras I love, and does so cheaply and efficiently. I don’t feel like I’m at work, and I only have one lens, so I can’t be sad about the one I didn’t bring, or be weighed down by a bag of unused glass.

My new plan then, is use film when it makes sense to use film, in the cameras I own. I’m about to publish a post about shooting film on holiday, in my under-utilised Fujinon GW690III amongst others.

My Tachihara Hope, my large format field camera has been on loan and is due back soon, and I hope to shoot 4×5 Slide film in it and achieve a life goal soon after.

I sincerely hope that the Rollei is outstanding. I really do. I’ve vacillated so many times about whether I would buy one. At one point I decided to put the money I saved by not buying the camera I can’t afford towards a new iPhone, because that’s a camera I use everyday without fail.

(I decided to persevere with my iPhone 12 for a little bit longer).

I have no problem being one of the people who buys a 35AF in 12-24 months time, once they’ve been reviewed, and I’ve seen one in person, and I’ve parted with my Canon F1, my broken Ricoh GR1, and my Fujinon GW690III, and possibly my Olympus MJU.

Right now it feels like a bet I can’t afford to lose, (or actually place).