I’m a Pentax person at heart. I think there’s a combination of the fact that K-mount cameras were all I could get my hands on as a kid, courtesy of my uncle’s Chinon CE-5 and the K100D I managed to get for far, far below market value as a teenager. Formative experiences coupled with the relative cheapness of lenses owing to the K-mount’s longevity and backwards compatibility made it a compelling piece of vendor lock-in for someone who is just one of those tedious open-source advocate types. Pentax M42 cameras have a similar appeal: the lens mount was basically ubiquitous for a while and the lenses are readily adaptable onto newer mirrorless bodies.

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I’d never had a film point and shoot until this year: all of my experience with film had been with SLRs between my time with a Canon AE-1 Program and a Chinon CE-5. This is probably a mix of me wanting to have “proper” cameras in my youth as some sort of claim to legitimacy - I was far more precocious than I am now - and being of far more limited means than I am now such that I could not be a choosing beggar. The Canon Sure Shot Zoom XL surprised me with how fun it was to use, even if I did get one purely because of the Japanese marketing name: the Autoboy Zoom Super. Canon has a real history of picking worse product names in the West than at home between this an the US EOS Rebel series.

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I never thought that I’d become a Leica person in my life, but conspicuous consumption and idle curiosity about what could possibly demand the premium for the cameras over their equivalents led to the inevitable. That said, I’m not really sure that the equivalent of a Leica MP would be in 2024: I don’t think anyone else is making 35mm rangefinders anymore. I think the overriding feeling here is that it’s a nice camera: there’s an awful lot to recommend the MP over the Petri 7s, but how much of that is the passage of 60 years and newer optics is something I’m unsure of.

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Redscale is an interesting technique to me as it’s just the sort of thing that someone would do by accident somehow and then discover “oh, this is good actually.” Combined with the fact that it’s simply using something incorrectly (exposing film through the base of the film stock so that light hits the red-sensitive layers first), it has just the level of ingenuity and slapshod hackery to make me love it.

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Kodak films have never been particularly exciting to me: they’ve always felt a little staid and understated in their rendition of colour. With something like a ten year gap since I last really shot film, the colour film options available have somewhat reduced: outside of the more exotic cinema 35mm films and other ‘boutique’ films, there are only really a handful of options that are likely be available in more common high-street settings. With that in mind, I’d decided to cast aside my prejudice and give it a go.

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I’m a sucker for anything I think I can fix. Whether this is people, the annoying drip from the pipe in a family member’s kitchen or a camera that someone else has deemed irreparable. The latter reared its head when I was sixteen, with a Petri 7s that I bought from eBay for what was probably £15 (£24.40 in 2024 prices, adjusted for inflation). The leaf blades of the shutter were completely seized and covered in what could only be fairly described as “gunk” and I had a copy of the service manual. A copy of the service manual and absolutely no finesse with my hands was not sufficient to salvage the camera.

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