Canon Sure Shot Zoom XL with Kodak Gold

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.

In spite of the Autoboy looking like somewhat of an ergonomic nightmare given how angular it is, it’s a lovely camera to use: it’s an electronic autofocus point and shoot of an eighties vintage, there’s not much to think about other than “press shutter button” and the grip and shutter button feel good to hold and use. I will say, however, that I didn’t use the zoom much: the 39-85mm range isn’t enough for me to really consider it a signifcant change in field of view to use it a lot - there’s not a lot of wide and not a lot of tele in that range, with it all being just a little more or less than a ‘standard’ focal length.

Kodak Gold is not my film, I don’t think. It doesn’t do anything I find interesting with colour rendition and renders a little warm for my liking. The grain occupies a weird space that is neither fine enough to not be noticable nor coarse enough to be interesting: it’s just… there. I’ve made remarks about leaning too much on the nature of a film for creative addition before when talking about Harman Phoenix and perhaps this is just the flip side of that: there’s nothing inspirational and nothing fun about Gold.

Much of the flatness of Gold could well be down to the nature of British winter’s light: it is often flat; it is often subdued - there’s a reason Ilford’s black and white film production feels at home here. I should probably learn to plan more for how light is going to be rather than merely hope that it’ll be great. Either that or only shoot black and white in winter if I feel like cheating a bit.

I like this photo on Lisle Street a lot: the lanterns provide some interest at the top of the frame and the street, as always, is busy and there’s a lot going on. It’s a shame that it includes someone’s arse, but an arse is always going to be involved if I took the photo.