All posts filed under: Camera review

Praktica MTL 50 review

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An entire generation of photographers learned the tricks of the trade on Praktica’s L range of cameras. From the beginning of the 1980s, the giant East German camera works of Pentacon in Dresden created a range of sturdy, simple 35mm SLR cameras that were sold in the hundreds of thousands on the other side of the Iron Curtain, giving countless photographers a cheap and reliable first step into proper photography. Some of the most common of these were the MTL models. The MTL 5 and 3 were both released around 1984; classic-looking chrome and black leather screw-mount SLRs, manual shutter speeds up to 1/1000th of a second and metering to ISO 1600, flash sync at 1/125th of a second and usually partnered with a Zeiss Jena 50mm lens. It was no-frills, but a perfect student camera; the Praktica had a simple centre-weighted meter, but everything else was manual. If the batteries ran out of juice, you could still able to take pictures if you were confident enough to guess the exposure. The MTL 3 and …

Lomo LC-Wide review

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There would be no Lomography without the Lomo LC-A compact camera. When the Soviet-era Lomo optical plant decided to copy the Japanese Cosina CX-2 camera back in the early 1980s, they had no idea what a craze they would create in later decades. The humble Lomo LC-A, often given out to delegates at Communist Party congresses as a free gift, was destined to be remembered as a footnote in Soviet camera production. Instead, its discovery by Austrian art students in the early 1990s created an analogue photography craze. The LC-A’s production was restarted, and it spawned a new culture in analogue photography that is still vital and thriving in this now digital world. The Lomo LC-A+, which was released in 2007, made some extra improvements to the basic Lomo LC-A; a higher ISO for using fast or pushed films, a cable-released thread in the shutter button, and a switch for shooting multiple exposures. It was a great update on the basic Lomo LC-A, but even more dramatic things were to come.

Lomo LC-A review

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I first heard about the Lomo LC-A in the year 2000. It was a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and eight years since a bunch of Austrian art students discovered one of these Soviet curios in a Prague junk shop and turned it into an enduring photographic fashion. I saw my first Lomo in a sadly long-defunct camera shop on London’s New Oxford Street. It was a Soviet-era Lomo LC-A from 1986, a heavy rectangle of matte black plastic with Ломо written on the front in faded Cyrillic script, a relic of Cold War cool. It cost £70 and it started an unshakeable love affair with analogue photography, and the weird and wonderful world of Lomography. The original Lomo may have been tweaked and refined – that Soviet-era design has evolved into the more flexible LC-A+ and the wide-angle LC-Wide, which I reviewed back in 2012. But these remakes owe their life to the original; the surprisingly heavy scale-focusing compact camera with the vignetting lens that has proved a remarkably enduring cult.

Pentax ESII review

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The Pentax ESII was the last generation of one of photography’s classic lines; the Pentax Spotmatic.  Few cameras before or since can match the simple elegance of this screw-mount workhorse; tough and reliable, it gave professional reliability within the grasp of the amateur enthusiast. And its lenses – Pentax’s range of Takumars – were truly world class. In 1971, the Electro Spotmatic bought Pentax’s classic into the space age; using a new range of specially modified lenses, it allowed aperture-priority shooting with a stepless, electronically controlled shutter. The admittedly  troublesome Electro Spotmatic was replaced by the more robust Pentax ES, and two years later, in 1973, by the ESII, which added a slightly different layout and metering up to ISO 3200. The ES II was only manufactured for two years – by the middle of the decade Pentax had embraced the bayonet mount, which was quicker to change than the old screw mounts. But this last gasp of the Spotmatic is a cracking camera; if I had to shoot on one camera for the rest …

Nikon FM2 review

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In the days when press photographers shot on film, most of them fell into one or two camps; Canon or Nikon. The Canon shooters used high end cameras like the T90 or, when autofocus arrived, the all-singing and all-dancing EOS 1. Nikon shooters used the trusty Nikon F range of cameras, ending with the pro-series F5, an autofocus beast built for warzones and anything else the world can throw at it. But even towards the end of the pro films days, Nikon press photographers usually had something else in their bags. It was a kind of last resort, something for when all the batteries were spent but pics still had to be captured. It was the Nikon FM2, and it was one of the best film cameras ever made.