Do not recklessly press the shutter button

Words of advice from the Canon Canonet manual. Actually, what it should have said was "Do not recklessly open the back of the camera before you have rewound the film thereby exposing it to the light and obliterating half of your photos, you eejit, you."

In the ongoing obsession with old cameras I bought a Canonet on ebay for £5.50 the other day. It's a rangefinder which is meant to be better for sneaking up on folk in the street. It certainly looks less fancy than an SLR and doesn't click as noisily (no mirror to flip up).

This one was billed as having a very faint rangefinder (it does) and a possibly erratic meter. Although the seller pointed out that Cartier-Bresson didn't use a rangefinder, he set the camera up and then "focused with his feet". I'm assuming he means he walked over to a position in which his subject was within the camera's depth of field. But he may well have actually twisted the lens with his feet, in which case he was even more talented than I'd realised.

Anyway, despite the various catastrophes, I managed to get several fairly decent photos, when I remembered to either use the rangefinder or focus with my feet. The meter seems to do quite a good job, particularly since it's working on nothing but a few selenium photosensitive cells.

Great Western Road.

Still on Great Western Road.

Retro clothes shop on Otago Street.

Woman looking at street sign.

The escalator into Kelvinbridge Underground station. I think the light might have got at this one a wee bit. Apparently they're thinking of extending the Underground out to the east of the city (Parkhead, not Edinburgh) and some bits may end up overground. And wombling free, I suppose.

A double exposure outside Sainsbury's when I hadn't quite got the film in properly. Loading the film went nearly as well as unloading it, in fact. But I quite like this picture.

Wee cottage-type house next to some tenements on Otago Street. A street of many photographic opportunities, as you can see...

River and cranes in the distance.

So the trial film wasn't a total loss, although I suspect the whole performance would have Cartier-Bresson and his focusing feet birling in their grave...

On the Vest Pocket Kodak front, I sent off for some film the other day, but it's not arrived yet. I hope it was a real company I ordered it from. And I'm still waiting to hear back from another company who specialise in developing ancient films, to see whether it's worth sending them the film that was in the camera when Alison found it.