Digital photography is seductive, but it’s amazing what can still be done with some film and a cheap camera.

I picked up this Canon Demi at a garage sale about 10 years ago.  It’s a “half frame” camera, meaning that it only uses half the negative that a regular 35mm camera uses.  Thus - on a “24 shot” roll of film, you can actually take about 48 shots.

The metering is an extremely simple photocell on the front of the camera that averages across the entire picture.  The camera has some crude manual controls; since it was bright out, I put it into “shutter priority” mode and left the shutter at 1/500th of a second.  Focus is manual, and I did my best with the little icons in the viewfinder.

Here’s the first shot.  Something that impresses me with film - even cheap film - is the latitude of tolerance.  I made no attempt to underexpose this shot to keep the canon well defined, and the canon still came out crisply.  The colours have nice saturation, and the depth of field gives the shot a nice sense of movement and scope.

The next shot is a detail of a brass gun.  I struggled to get the entire gun in one shot, and took this last shot in desperation before moving on.  The leaf is a nice touch; it brings a glimmer of humility to an otherwise stark image.  The Demi’s very basic lens didn’t lose any of the detail, and the colours didn’t need a single bit of touching up after scanning.

Statues - especially statues photographed from a low angle - are tough to expose.  A bright sky like the one we enjoyed today typically underexposes the foreground.  I “fooled” the Demi by depressing the shutter halfway with the camera pointed at the statue … this locked the higher aperture in place, allowing me to expose this shot properly.  A little bit of guesswork and a little bit of ingenuity resulted in a pleasant shot of mother and child, cast in brass.

As I said before, digital is a wonderful thing … but there’s still plenty of reason to dust off the old film camera and put a few rolls through it.  The results from my $10 garage-sale purchase easily match my $1100 digital SLR, and I certainly don’t have to worry about an unsavory individual mugging me for my camera.