Met a Japanese film photographer.

footman

footman

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I was in the City of London yesterday doing some architecture type shots and trying out some old colour film I found in a charity shop.
Walking down King William Street sporting my EOS1 with 24-105L I passed a young Japanese couple going the other way.
Didn't recognise the 2 cameras he had round his neck but immediately recognised the FD zoom on one of them.

Something made me turn around to look at them and they had also stopped and were grinning at me. Cue mutual handshakes, bowing and more grinning.
We discussed the merits of togging in London particularly with film.

He was using not 1 but 2 A1's! When I asked him about film users in Japan he laughed and said that he knew many photographers but he was the only one using film.

All his friends thought he was mad!
 
Thats strange I thought Japan would have loads of people using film. Its quite trendy right now to use film because of photographers like Araki and Daido Moriyama.

Proof here:
http://tokyocamerastyle.com/
 
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Leica said a similar thing to that as well recently saying how in Japan film is seen as 'cool' and 'retro' but in North Amercia their the exact opposite so sales of the M7 and MP have dropped to only providing 2.5% roughly of their profit. In Europe however they claimed it was more 'in the middle' as there is still a steady stream of buyers of their film based cameras from there and Japan. But their biggest market is North America so that has hit sales hard.
 
On holiday in Dorset this summer I 'accosted' a young woman who was photographing objects on the beach with a film camera. She turned out to be German - from former East Germany I believe - and seemed bemused at my suggestion that hardly anyone shoots film anymore.

I'd never seen the camera she was using before, it looked a bit like a Praktica but the name ended in 'Flex (Reginaflex?). I had to get my AV-1 just to prove I wasn't a cheesy old weirdo hitting on attractive young women going about their lawful business. Waving a Canon under her nose while pointing and smiling 'look!' did little to dissuade her from the notion.
 
colpepper said:
On holiday in Dorset this summer I 'accosted' a young woman who was photographing objects on the beach with a film camera. She turned out to be German - from former East Germany I believe - and seemed bemused at my suggestion that hardly anyone shoots film anymore.

I'd never seen the camera she was using before, it looked a bit like a Praktica but the name ended in 'Flex (Reginaflex?). I had to get my AV-1 just to prove I wasn't a cheesy old weirdo hitting on attractive young women going about their lawful business. Waving a Canon under her nose while pointing and smiling 'look!' did little to dissuade her from the notion.
Click to expand...

Rolleiflex?
 
Alastair said:
Rolleiflex?
Click to expand...

'Fraid not. I didn't want to gawp as the camera was hanging next to a rather low cut T-shirt but the name wasn't one I've come across. It looked like a generic manual body of the 70s - a Chinon say - on which a supplier had imposed a script-on-black badge. In fact the script only had the first part of the name with ..flex in caps.

My instinct said a DDR era copy or under licence job, with a retailer's logo, a sort of East Berlin Dixons own brand, though that impression may be 100% incorrect :|
 
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