Out of the Box: Canon P

It was only when my sister pointed it out that I realised how far gone I was. What started as a curiosity has turned into a mini-obsession and it threatens to go much, much further every day.

Since I started shooting photos on film I’ve accrued a few cameras. Once you have more than two cameras picking which one to take with you becomes more and more complex, which was why my sister found me staring down into my box of equipment. You have a BOX of cameras… Her pointing out the obvious made me realise what I had become. It seems like something I would have noticed before. Did I really need that third Canonet 19 from Ebay? Wasn’t the very act of purchasing a 35 litre storage box for my cameras hint enough for me? No, I needed the simple statement of someone outside of my world to bring it home. Did it change anything? No, I think I’ve bought at least 4 lenses and 60 rolls of film since that day.

Now i’m taking them out to show you, today one of my favourites is coming out of the box: The Canon P. Though flawed it has created some of my most loved photos of the past year.

This is a very early Canon model, first released in 1959. It resembles a Leica and uses the same screw mount for its lenses. The one I have comes to me from my grandfather with a 50m lens. It’s a totally manual camera which means I’m often guessing what settings to use or needing a light meter.

It kind of works most of the time. Unfortunately it has some mould and grease on the inside of the lens and it does sometimes misfire on the longer shutter settings. The rangefinder is also strangely out of alignment. With a rangefinder you are not looking through the lense like an SLR, you look through a window near the lense and focus by moving a ghostly second image around the viefinder. When the ghost and the real overlap then that is what will be in focus. This camera has its ghost image shifted down just a bit and often refuses to even move into vertical alignment… you kind of have to have faith in the diagonal nature of what you are looking at.

I have to admit, I’ve got more than one roll of film full of absolute crap but I do like the ghostly nature of the images, they’re cool in an arty hipster sort of way. With the right subject matter it works perfectly but for most things it’s not the ideal camera. I’d say it specializes in capturing eerie and spooky images.

Some of my results are below, i’ve also made a gallery with much bigger images (and more of them) at my webpage: Atomic Bread.com

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