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Contax G1 - back to film

The Contax G1 is the best camera I have ever owned. Full stop. Amazingly well built, I think it must be made of titanium but still weighed a fair bit. There was no real event that caused this purchase other than the obvious movement back from digital to film. I also bought a 9600dpi flatbed scanner and all the kit to develop my own photos. So I bought 100 metres of Ilford Delta Pro film and all the necessary chemicals and tanks and just started to learn. Great fun! I played around with pushing the film, pulling it and all sorts of tricks from my Dads old darkroom books. This whole chapter taught me a lot about photography and made me appreciate the moment of hitting the shutter a lot more than, say, the D70 years did. Having a large compact flash card and a battery that lasted for years meant I typically took thousands of photos. Moving back to film that all changed. I had a selection of the amazing Zeiss lenses for the camera. Probably my favourite was the 35mm option although the 45mm standard was superb. The 28mm was a really nice wider option. Overall the rangefinder experience was one that really got me hooked on taking photos again, it was mechanically very simple but allowed for a fair amount of manualy configuration as well as the unique method of focussing. Thanks to the guys at Ffordes the year of ownership probably cost me about £20, as I bought and sold the whole lot through them. In the end though the appeal of moving back to digital was just too great. In the age of websites and instant results it was frustrating to come back from a weekend away and have to take about an hour to develop and dry my own film, then another hour to scan the negs. Two hours to look at 24 shots was the definite downside.

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