I said smile dude...! 

The Zombie Apocalypse is upon us! If you are going to go out to document the last days of mankind, what would you use? Let's be fair, the Internet would die, and unless someone had access to your digital camera raw files, they would never be able to see how the world really ended. So your best bet would be to get a film camera to document everything before a Zombie gets you and eats your brain. So what are your choices? Read on. 

Nikon F6

Yup, still selling after all these years, be prepared to pay up to US$2600 to own one. This is like driving an all auto car, nothing to worry about, just point and shoot. The intelligent system will take care of backlighting and is weather sealed to prevent dust and water. So if you are running away from zombies through mud and grime, you'd be pretty sure the camera would work so long as you have these AA batteries handy. That's right, for all the metering and shutter to work, it needs to be powered up. This is what a professional photographer from the film age would buy. Lenses are autofocus too so no worries. Think of this as the Porsche of the analog camera world. 

Nikon FM10

It is like riding a five speed bicycle. Not the fastest camera, all manual...think of it as driving a stick shift, and the intelligence has to be from you and not the camera. It needs a battery to power up the light metering but aside from this, the camera will work without one if you know the Sunny 16 rule for film exposure. Selling for less than US$600, it is as dependable as an ice cream truck when you are getting away from brain eating zombies. 

Leica MP and M7

The M Professional or the M7 are both very similar, in that it cost a bomb to own. The M7 is the cheaper brother which cost in the ballpark of US$4,400 while the MP is up there at US$7,000. The exquisite Leica glass often cost more than the camera but that's another story. The Leica MP is for the Pro who prefers to have weather sealing. The MP uses SR44 cells to power the metering but beyond that, you don't have to worry much if you don't have it on your person. It still fires mechanically...but a word of warning... the M7 can't do the same. 

One of the problems with Rangefinders is that the viewfinder is a little off and without the proper frame lines within the viewfinder, you have to be psychic to shoot one. 

The M7 on the other hand is just another tool. I can't say much about these Ferraris of the analog camera world. Even though these German made machines are dependable enough to use as a weapon should a Zombie get you, it just doesn't quite fit the scenario if you had to pawn your left kidney to buy one. Then you have the split image focusing, which is quite a drag to use during low light. If money is no object to you then by all means ante up, and it uses 2L76 cell batteries if you want to have it shooting up to 60 rolls. 

Horizon Perfekt

A 35mm camera that shoots super wide images that encompasses two frames instead of one. This one is sold through the Lomo site and cost about US$350. Not bad if you want super wide panos on ordinary 135 film and with a selectable shutter speed, it probably is quite fun too. If you are looking to shoot wide open Zombie landscapes, this would be the perfect camera to use. As a wide angle camera, you could put yourself in a selfie the moment you are cornered by man eating zombies as a last documented proof that you have been assimilated. 

Lomo LCA+ and LCA Wide

Not one of my favs for reasons obvious, these are zone focusing cameras and what you see isn't what you get if you turn the focus dial wrongly. Some might like the blurry images as an art form but I beg to differ. However if you are not interested in pin sharp pictures of Zombies, hey....knock yourself. The LCA+ cost US$250 while the LCA Wide is US$390. Both are available for online purchase on the lomo site. 

Originally copied by the Russians and made famous as a point and shoot. The LCA was notorious when it came to reliability. So they sold out and gave the opportunity to the Chinese to make them but the camera's Mintar lens that made those gorgeous pictures famous are still Russian made. The color saturation difference between the normal 32mm focal length and 17mm focal length of the LCA Wide isn't much but the aperture on the LCA Wide isn't very useful in low light thanks to its f/4 aperture. 

So Here is the Deal...

Buy what you can afford. Each has its own quirks. Some require batteries, others don't. But if you want metering to be functioning, you need batteries, period. These could be the LR44 varieties for the Lomo LCA or AA batteries for the Nikon F6 with the battery grip or two CR123A without the grip. 

Lenses are another thing. For SLRs, having a zoom is great, and easier to shoot with. The Rangerfinders on the other hand requires you to have more than one lens at hand. Those with fixed focus lenses like the Lomo and Horizon will require you to run up close to your subject which can prove dangerous during a Zombie outbreak. 

Digital isn't going to cut it. Especially if you upload everything to the cloud, no one will ever see it. What's more, if your iPhone dies, your photos will die with it. That is why film is the way to go. Even if the exposed roll doesn't get developed immediately, your photos will remain intact as proven by people who bought used cameras from the last country and were still able to develop the unfinished roll of film within it. 

So if you want some semblance of legacy....shoot film. 

This is an image of a rooftop ladder where a photographer claims he shot a silhouette of a plane though while waiting for a plane to fly over.

It won a Nikon prize in Singapore.

Goes to show that you only need an ounce of photoshop skills to win something online.

Using photoshop, the image was detected to be fake. But Nikon refuse to admit its error. This sparked a whole slew of fake pictures that became a meme.

Including this one of a Tie Fighter. 

So what do we take from this? Obviously a picture is worth a thousand words but with Photoshop, it's worth probably far more. 

I recently had a conversation with a camera retailer who joked that these days, you don't have to be a top notch photographer to get jobs...as long as your photoshop skills are excellent that's what clients want. 

Looking back, what he said is true. I mean, which of you out there who shoot weddings and commercial photos would refuse to use Photoshop to remove any imperfections?

Running a Photo Contest is a fatal affair for a Brand

During my time with Sony, I was given a chance to run a photo contest and we did. It was a difficult decision and we had to take Photoshop into account. 

You had to send in copies of your originals which were short listed and later, asked for the RAW files. The contest itself was free to enter. We only wanted pictures that told a story and that was it. There was a lot of work involved and many people were engaged for a rather simple project like this. 

All because we wasted to be sure that whoever won the prize deserved it. 

When brands like Nikon give out prizes to undeserving photographers, it gives the impression that Nikon values Photoshopped images more than real ones and this is VERY bad for the brand. 

Nikon was in no doubt not in a big hurry to remove the image from its Facebook page or for that matter cancel the award. They were lost for words. Sort of like shooting yourself in the foot and then putting your foot in your mouth. 

This is why having a photo editor run a contest is crucial. And these are not your average Tom, Dick or Harry. They are experts in detecting fraud and in another time, they would be known as fraud detectors. Why do Brands have to do this? Because Photoshop exist. 

Photoshopping is not illegal for Stock Image Sales

Many a time, Stock Image Banks or Libraries do not make it clear on the subject of image manipulation because they encourage it. 

Stock images sell because it is a cleaned imaged, that means an image that has been created or staged to the point that it appeals to buyers. 

If you have brands in the background or foreground, it is up to you to remove them. Once it is done, it because more marketable as the buyer doesn't need a copy of Photoshop to clean it up for their use. 

A less than perfect photo isn't enough. It has to be perfect, not for viewing but for commercial use. 

Once photographers get into the habit of this, then firing up Photoshop becomes a routine affair for processing photos rather than use Image Editors like Lightroom. 

Photography is about the capture of Images

This is where I have problems with the above understanding. You become less of a photographer and more of a photo manipulator. 

You then have to ask yourself where you stand. 

I don't have a copy of Photoshop sitting on my computer for the last five years, and have allowed my Photoshop skills to depreciate with each new version of Photoshop CC. Do I miss it? 

Not one bit. 

I find that I enjoy my photography more either using a mobile device or on an analog camera. I don't even use my digital cameras to shoot anymore. 

The purity of the experience is in the art of making photos with a camera and not with a computer. I don't think of capturing less than perfect photos because I know I can fire up Photoshop to change things around in an image. 

This is a very important lesson if you want to learn the art of Photography in a digital age. 

You have to ask yourself if you are doing it for profit or for your own sense of enjoyment before embarking on it and if you say the former, that is to sell your works, then you probably need to ante up on your Photoshop skills more than your Photography skills. 

Photos can also be sold as framed artworks so this works to your advantage if that is your goal. 

The the purist who just wants to enjoy Photography, my advice is for you to take up a film camera before you shoot with a digital one. The experience and skills you pick up from this contributes exponentially to your skills later and you won't regret a moment of it. 

Olympus Pen FT half frame film camera 

Film cameras are pretty cheap to procure from eBay these days and for me, I wanted to experience what having a half frame camera would be like. It's moments like these that challenge you as I have shot on 35mm film but never in half frame. The reason was simple. I didn't have the money to buy a half frame camera and had to settle for a 110 type compact film camera. Moving up to a 35mm camera was my next step up the ladder as by that time, the only half frame camera still selling was an automatic Yashica Samurai. It looked perfectly space age but I felt something wasn't right. It just didn't look like a real camera!

This is a single 35mm frame, captured by a half frame camera

After doing some research, I settled for two classics from the 60s, the Pen F and FT. The difference is one comes without a light meter while the other one has one built in. The F model was the first and chirpy to use. The viewfinder is bright and the lenses are pretty good. So good in fact many idiots ended up selling the lenses to MFT digital mirror camera users, leaving the bodies behind to gather dust. That means you can get plenty of F cameras but they are without any lenses. 

To be fair, there are Nikon F mount adapters as well as OM Lens versions. The problem is the availability of these mounts are pretty hard to come by these days. After all, the camera is close to half a century old (I must admit that I was born after the camera was introduced to this world). 

Having had experienced some of the best full frame film cameras like the Nikon FM and F4, going back to a camera that takes half frame is a bit disconnecting. Both the Pen FT and F are SLR type cameras, the only difference is that they have a very different type of lens arrangement and the FT suffers from a much darker viewfinder as some of the light has been siphoned off to power the light meter—making it a shade darker. This also means that in low light scenes, it will appear a little more difficult to focus. I prefer the F's focus screen as it's split screen so you can nail the focus faster than the FT. 


Anyway, if you want to start shooting with half frame pen cameras like the FT, and F, here are a couple of tips. 

Do not use a film faster than ASA 400 

ASA 400 film has more grain than ASA 100 film, so it goes to show that it's better to use lower ASA film to get a better result. The larger the grain, the more it will show once you enlarge the frame. 

Another thing is that film stocks differ too. For example, negative film has less contrast quality than compared to slide or positive film. You need to know the types of film and their quality before hand to get the best out of them. No two film stocks are alike.

Even for B/W film, those processed specifically in C-41 color chemicals exhibit a lower quality of contrast than those processed specifically with B/W chemicals. 

Some people even shot slide film with the half frame camera and there were half frame slides that could be used on slide projectors at one time. Slide film would be awesome but exposure would have to be spot on. 

Crop your scene in the camera viewfinder

Subjects like city skylines and landscapes are poor choices for half frame because you have a much smaller image to play with. In terms of distance to subject, the best are within 15 feet from your camera. If the subject is too small within the frame, you will have to crop it to make it look larger and unless you get high quality scans at 300dpi and above on positive film, chances are those images won't be suitable for further cropping when captured on negative film. 

this is a tight crop with the whole subject area filling the frame

In a full frame 35mm slide or negative, you don't have this problem as the film area is twice as large this allows for better clarity and composition as you can still crop the frame for a tighter composition and still have plenty left over for a good print. In half frame, you are discouraged from doing this as cropping it further will not enhance the detail and clarity as you are already stuck with a smaller frame. Blowing that up will lead to more dot grain. 

You have to think in terms of how much can you enlarge your half frame image before the quality starts to suffer. In camera cropping of the scene to fill your frame is recommended

Always use a Light Meter

Got an iPhone? Cool! Now download that light meter app that lets you use your iPhone measure spot exposure. The Pen FT has a built in meter but the F only comes with an external one. The problem with the FT meter is that it is not entirely accurate for spot readings. In light meters apps there are two varieties. 

The incidence light meter measures falling light from a source while a spot meter measures light at where you are pointing. The incidence light meter has a diffusion dome for a head while the spot meter uses the iPhone's camera to measure light from a desire location. It's not the most accurate but it does fine for general lighting but when it comes to high contrast scenes you have to take several measurements using the Zone System to best bring out the hidden details. 

Kodalux and Voigtlander lightmeters for film cameras

The zone system of film exposure tells you to measure both the highlight and low lights to ensure that the details are captured on film. 

You can also get those analogue light meters but the new ones are more accurate. Take for example the Voigtlander meter, it is very accurate and uses 2x LR44 batteries. Whereas the Kodalux doesn't use any batteries and can be subject to wear after the photo sensitive element wear out over time. 

Scanning and Post Production

Developing a roll and having it scanned is relatively easy but I must warn you that some photo labs don't do this. You need to have someone who has a color lab that also caters to the needs of film photographers to get high quality scans as most of the scanning done through color lab process is of a lower quality. 

I have not shot these on positive film but these will pose a bit of a problem as half frame slide mounts are very difficult to come by these days. In the old days, there were easy but I have only come across one or two sellers so far on eBay. 

That's not to say you can't shoot with positive film using half frame cameras if all you want is a scanned image for sharing and a physical slide frame for archival purposes. 

The half frame camera is quirky at best, something which you should be aware of from the very beginning. It's probably quite good for street photography and anything casual but wide angle shooting like landscapes and cityscapes would be extremely difficult to achieve. 

For one, the wide angle lenses from Olympus for the FT and F cameras are extremely expensive...it's probably even next to impossible to get them now as can be seen by the relative prices of these lenses once they are available on eBay. Wide angle is probably the half frame camera's weakest point, and it shows. 

When you scan, and depending on the scanner used. The scanned image is no larger than 4 megapixels if you are using a 8 megapixel full frame scanner. You must not forget that you will lose picture quality once you start to divide the image in half. Bummer....but that's how it is. 

The last hurdle is really the lenses for the Pen F. These have become very hard to come by over the years because mirrorless camera users have been snapping them up. That also means there are a whole load of F cameras that sell without any lens and you can bargain that down cheap. To use, you will have to find a way to obtain a lens mount for full frame Nikon or Olympus OM lenses which is also relatively difficult to find these days. Besides this, shooting with a half frame is really an experience where you can learn to appreciate analog photography. The challenge is what you should be looking forward to as the mere click of a shutter to get a picture can easily be satisfied with just your mobile phone camera while the same can't be said for film cameras. 
 

Pen F, note the F motif. This is the first model

Cosina recently announced the end of production for all its rangefinder cameras. Even in a time where interest in film photography has become a bit of a renaissance, Cosina could not sell enough of them to keep them alive. 

This is not to say that you'll see the Voigtlanders disappear from the shelves overnight. There are still plenty of stocks, just that maybe the models might be looking for won't be in stock. 

Like for example the Bessa R4M would have been my camera of choice. It has 21mm framelines for wide angle shooting, so you don't have to buy an optional viewfinder like in the case of Leica M cameras. Leica has no solution for wide angle lenses except for a clip on viewfinder which you have to pay for. 

Voigtlander lenses are still being manufactured so it's not a big dent on your film shooting experience. 

For me, the Voigtlander rangefinder cameras was a good step towards film photography for beginners as they are much cheaper to own than compared to the Leica MP or M series rangefinders. 

Leica still manufactures the MP, a pro level film camera which cost a bomb. But the Bessa was the cheaper alternative. In fact, it is only a fraction of the cost of a used Leica M7. You could go buy a used film camera on eBay, but there are some of us who want to own something new. 

Why the SLR won the Film Battle

Before the introduction of the SLR, the rangefinder was the only professional film camera you could use. How the SLR became king of the hill was simple. It was much easier to focus and use. 

In a rangefinder, you have to align two split focus images together to know that you are in focus, whereas in a SLR, you can judge the focus by the clarity of the whole frame. Even the highly praised Olympus XA did away with rangefinder focusing in subsequent models. 

The ease of using a SLR was evident from the onset but prices between the two didn't differ as much. Both needed manual lenses and the Japanese found a way to make it cheaper. This meant that Voigtlander was sold to Cosina and the European heritage faded away. 
Over the years, Voigtlander started to withdraw production of its cameras, the first to go were the A models, now even the M models have been killed off. 

As rangefinder cameras fell out of fashion, the digital age was probably the final nail in the coffin. 

What you'd be missing on a Voigtlander Cameras

The Bessa R3M had a 1:1 viewfinder aspect ratio so you can keep both eyes open to frame a subject. This is clearly a step above what a Leica could do. 

But shooting with a film camera like the Bessa takes some getting used to, the A models have auto exposure while the M is fully manual. I could double down on a manual model as that is the best way to experience rangefinder photography like the old pros use to do. 

Using an old world method to capture images has to be experienced to be appreciated. 

There is no instant previews or sharing to social media. Film has to be developed and printed. Money must be spent on film. 

Film stocks give a varying degree of results. No two film stocks behave the same way. You get 36 shots in a roll, which means there is no machine gunning your way to a picture like you do on an iPhone. 

If you mess up the exposure, there is no second chances so you have to bracket shots which are important to you. 

Film photography, especially using a rangefinder camera, sharpens your level of observation as you learn to anticipate picture  moments before it happens. This is more so with the rangefinder as you need to work the focus and set an exposure for the moment while thinking of the framing. 

If you don't work fast enough, you will miss that moment. So instead seizing the moment, you anticipate it why observing what goes on around you. 

Sure you can do this with a film SLR as well, but that defeats the point of training your eye and mind to think at the same time. 

Shooting with a rangefinder is more difficult, sort of like driving with a stick shift on a classic car but the experience you get from it is out of this world. It's a sense of achievement to be able to shoot good pictures on film with a rangefinder than it is on your iPhone. 

So if you intend to embark on this challenge, I urge you to hurry. Bessa models would soon be only found in a used camera store.