Downtown with a Canon EOS3

 

 

In March or April I bought a Canon EOS3 that was advertised locally. It lacked a few small items like eyecup and weather plugs for various socket holes but that was reflected in a very good price. And as it turns out my Elan eyecups are the same and that is the one bit that I feel I need to shoot this camera comfortably, being a glasses wearer. I expect the little rubber plugs/caps are not that hard to find either.

These pictures are my first roll shot through the camera on a nice day in April, but only scanned this week. It is Fuji Superia 200 and my Filmtrackr notes indicate I metered it at ISO320. This is an error, of one kind or another. Either I did meter it at 320 (though the images don’t look that way) in which case I was thinking it was 400ISO film even though the notes say 200. Perhaps I metered it correctly, or I just got turned around and underexposed the film a bit when I intended to over-expose a bit. So, what all this means is I am not sure how I metered the film, but as you can see it came out pretty well which ever way the metering went.

I dressed the Canon EOS3 with an EF 50/f1.4 USM lens which is always a good place to start when testing an EOS mount camera as I use that lens a lot on my DSLR and know its performance well. I did take a couple of shots with a pinhole body cap (f222), one of which came out more or less (a subsequent roll from this camera will show more from that device).

I am not going to review the EOS3 in detail – it is a far more complex camera than I usually shoot for film and is well reviewed on the internet already. In most ways the EOS3 is comparable to my 5D Mark II – not quite the very top of the line pro SLR/DSLR, but very close. It does have eye-controlled focusing which I am messing with a bit to see if I can make it work with my glasses on and there are signs it might work once I have trained it enough. It has many more focus points than the 5Dii and seems to focus just as quickly and accurately as the more modern camera. It does not have a built-in dioptric compensation which is a bit of a drag as I don’t want to buy one without being able to try it to see if it is right.

The camera is hefty, similar to the 5Dii in dimensions. It is weather-proofed to a greater degree than the Canon Elan series cameras I own, which is one reason I bought it. In this respect it seems on par with the 5Dii, which I have been able to fog up the LED windows on a couple of times with horrid wet or snowy weather, but haven’t yet overdone it to the point of damage. I also bought it because the Elan series cameras, which I like very much (especially the 7N) are more cheaply made and have parts fail, especially the door latches which are plastic and getting hard to find. The EOS3 pays the price by being heavier so this is not a casual about town camera. But then the Elans are not either – that is why I have little pocket film cameras.

This promises to be a very reliable camera with predictable results – a nice companion to the 5Dii as it takes the same lenses, flash units and all that stuff that I already own. I think the results speak well for this camera – I am pretty thrilled with some of these photos, and am reminded also to use Fuji Superia 200 more often, it really is a nice film.

 

 

Click on any image below to launch larger versions in the gallery view, navigate with the arrows once in the gallery.

I shot these shadows for my 2015 Roll-1, worth a revisit

No cars this day, Store St parking

Can’t quite recall where this is. Store Street?

Off Bastion Square, part of mural design

Down an alley near Bastion Square

I think this might be part of Cool Aid

Store Street improvements

Market Square – this tile surface all gone now 😦

Market Square

Poor marketing perhaps?

With pinhole body cap in Drake pub

Drake Pub washroom

Orange cuddling up downtown

Victoria Urban Iron, nr Capital Iron

Banner blowing into fence

Where BBQs go to die

Paddler, resting

Store Street

Swift Street

New bridge about to replace old.

2016-42: Canon EOS3, 50/1.4 lens, Fuji Superia 200, possibly metered at ISO320, commercially developed, home scanned.

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