Color Film

I had the good fortune of being given a 1970s Canon rangefinder camera, specifically the Canonet QL17. My friend got it from a garage sale, and on being completely unable to figure out how to use it, he gave it to me.

The main issue with the camera is that it takes batteries that have since been banned due to mercury content. There is simply no way to correctly meter the exposure value to take photographs with it. My solution nice and complicated. I discovered that I could load up third party firmware for my digital Canon camera. This firmware hack allows me to really dig deeply into the guts of the camera and get at all the settings and measurements.

After many hours of fiddling with the digital camera I discovered that I could get an accurate Ev reading for 100 Iso sensitivety out of the camera. With that Ev reading I could use a chart I found on the internet to correctly set the aperture and shutter speed of the Canonet camera.

So to take a picture with this film camera the steps are.

1. Get EV reading with digital camera.
2. Convert Ev to camera settings with chart.
3. Take photo with Film Camera.

This is an overly annoying amount of work, but I have got so much out of this experience. I have to say that I have learned the most I think I will ever learn about photography from figuring out this whole thing that I ever will.

Here are some of the results, hopefully some black and white stuff will follow, I still need to a find a place to get it developed.

Kyler