A complete camera system for under £350? Surely not!

25/11/11

Oh, yes! A film SLR and five lenses, all of which primes and three of them fast ones. What's more, the gear is in almost new condition. Impossible? Not any more.

I've got an old Praktica MTL3 with a standard Pentacon 50mm f/1.8 lens that I bought for 20 quid at a car-boot sale a few years ago. For those not familiar with these cameras, they were made in east Germany in the 70's. It's a well built piece of kit and works fine. OK, the meter has given up the ghost over the years, but apart from that it still does the business ... and quite well. I recently took it with me on a few shoots and found that I started using it more and more instead of the Hasselblad. Why? Mainly because of its size and weight, which is a fraction of the 'Blad. Don't get me wrong, I love my Hasselblads, and for me there's nothing better out there, but lately I've been using them more in the studio and less on locations. So, I sat down one day and thought about this in a bit more detail.

I really like the 35mm format and the negatives produced by a vintage camera like the Praktica but, as with most things, I wanted something better. The Praktica MTL3 with a 50mm lens can be picked up nowadays – in fairly good condition – for less than £50, and for that you get a solid 35mm camera that takes some serious vintage looking photographs. It's a lovely camera, but I wanted something a bit more sophisticated, yet, like the Praktica, completely mechanical. I didn't want to pay a fortune either. So I started looking into vintage 35mm SLR's and lenses. I knew that, depending on what you're after, there would be some bargains out there, but I hadn't expected to be paying as little as I did.

I started with Nikon, because I knew that their old film cameras have a very good reputation. A Nikon FM is a beautiful camera, and was high on my list, but I found that especially in excellent condition they're hard to find, they're still quite pricey and Nikon's lens system simply confuses the hell out of me. I then looked at Pentax, Canon and Minolta, but it somehow wasn't what I had imagined. There was always something somewhere that I wasn't entirely happy with, that wasn't quite right.

Then I came across Olympus and the OM system. I didn't know a lot about them, but I instantly knew that this was what I was looking for. A little more research on the internet confirmed this: great cameras and a huge choice of fantastic lenses, all at ridiculous prices. OM cameras and Zuiko lenses are relatively easy to come by and it's not too difficult to find gear that's in excellent condition either, you just have to hunt around a bit. So I did, and in a relatively short while I had found a reputable dealer with a mint minus condition OM-1N and 50mm f/1.8 standard lens for sale. He had even gone through the trouble of replacing the light seals in the camera, something you normally have to do yourself. The camera really was in amazing condition when I got it, and the seller even chucked in a body cap and rear lens cap free of charge, something I had specifically asked for and was prepared to pay for. These type of combos normally don't come with these two caps anymore. I paid £90.

Then I started looking for other lenses. I wanted something for landscapes, something for portraits and something with quite a bit more reach. It didn't take long and I found a 28mm f/2.8, a 100mm f/2.8 (a lens that is a lot rarer than most other Zuiko lenses), a 135mm f/3.5 and a 200mm f/4. I paid £50 for the 28mm, £90 for the 100mm, £40 for 135mm and £70 for the 200mm. They were all in fantastic condition and perfect working order. New, back in the 70's and 80's all this must have cost an absolute fortune. I don't know how much exactly, but there can be no doubt that it would have been very very expensive.
I paid £340 for the whole lot, no doubt a mere fraction of what this would have originally cost. Prices vary enormously, though. It's possible to pay even less for this sort of gear if you're happy with more used looking items. At the same time I also could've easily paid a hundred pounds more than I did for the same condition items.

I have since also bought a 35-70mm f/4 zoom lens and a 50mm f/1.4 lens, which I now use as a standard instead of the 50mm f/1.8. The f/1.4 versions are harder to come by and the slightly bigger aperture makes a noticeable difference especially so when you look through the viewfinder. Both lenses are in almost mint condition and together cost me £110. Personally, I would have paid even more for them, since the quality of these lenses is nothing short of amazing, optically and the way they're manufactured, but I'm certainly not going to complain.

So, a great camera and no less than seven lenses, six of which primes, for 450 quid – how is this possible?
The short answer to this is, and I don't think it'll come as a great surprise, the continuing success of digital. That's really all there is to it. Despite the fact that there is a renewed interest in analogue photography, the amount of people shooting film is negligible in the grand scheme of things. The majority of people shoot digital and the digital market is at the forefront of photography as with everything else nowadays. Film is obsolete, no longer viable and profitable, so a lot of the analogue stuff is being sold for peanuts - unless, of course, you've got your heart set on a Leica or a Hasselblad. Sellers, and a lot of owners, currently still just want rid of the stuff and that's a real blessing for people like me.
Of course this might not last. If this current resurgence of interest in film photography should turn into something more substantial then prices for film gear will increase significantly, but for now I'm really enjoying the bargains. Keep shooting digital, folks!

(Copyright ©2011 Oliver Rauer)