Film Camera 2019/4 – Canon Sureshot Owl – Results

by Posted in Black & White, Canon Sureshot Owl, Film Leave a comment
canonowl-1-of-5

So how did it go with the camera. In a word – disastrous!

When I got the scans back I could barely see anything. Looking at the histogram everything was clustered into a small area in the middle, indicating that there was virtually no contrast at all (I think).

I’ve used quite a number of old film cameras and even though I’ve lost a few frames here and then I’ve never had something like this: a complete roll that’s useless. I’ve no idea what went wrong. Was it something I did? I doubt it. The camera has little in the way of controls so I doubt I could have set something incorrectly. I noted that the camera already had a film inside when I got it. I have no idea how long it had been there. Could it have degraded to such an extent that this happened? Maybe a problem with the camera itself? It seemed to be working, but who knows?

After some tweaking in Lightroom I managed to make the images visible if nothing else. I’ve posted a few here since I think it’s worth celebrating failures as well as successes. They remind me of some of pictures I’ve seen from the very early days of photography.

I’m tempted to try the camera again with a fresh roll of film to see what I get. But the cost of the film plus the cost of processing and scanning deters me. But I can be stubborn and I’d really like to know if the camera is working even if, at its best, it’s probably not such a great camera. We’ll see.

canonowl-2-of-5

canonowl-3-of-5

canonowl-4-of-5

canonowl-5-of-5

Film Camera 2019/4 – Canon Sureshot Owl

by Posted in Canon Sureshot Owl Leave a comment
sureshotowl-1-of-1

This wasn’t supposed to be my next film camera. I had hoped to use a recently acquired Minolta Maxxum 7. In fact I was actually rather excited to use it, but unfortunately it was dead on arrival (See: A couple of Ebay experiences for more info).

So I reached for the nearest film camera. It turned out to be a Canon Sureshot Owl, which was one of a number of old point and shoot cameras given to me by a neighbor a while back (See: A bag full of cameras). One of the reasons I selected it was because it already had a film in it.

It’s a very basic, point and shoot camera with little in the way of controls. There’s a review of it here: The Canon Sure Shot Owl / Prima AF-7. I probably would not have paid much attention to if it weren’t for one thing: it has a really huge, clear and bright viewfinder. As the review states:

The first thing that strikes you about this camera is the viewfinder: it is bright and beautiful! It is a really great viewfinder.

I guess this quote also from the review just about sums it up:

Shooting the camera, for a modern DSLR user, takes some getting used to. Firstly, there is nothing to do except point the camera and press the shutter button. There is no feedback from the camera on what is happening. You don’t know what shutter speed was used, you don’t know what f/stop was used, and you don’t know what focal distance was used. Very disconcerting for someone used to controlling every aspect of the process.

So a fairly typical point and shoot camera. Off we go. Results to follow.

.