Canonet QL 17 review and sample images
A story of me getting to grips with the Canonet QL17 film camera after well over a decade of shooting entirely digital. This post explains how I found the camera, how I got used to shooting with it and what the results from the first successfully sho roll of film were like.
Can you “rediscover” film photography if you never really discovered it in the first place? My experience of photography in my childhood amounted to nothing more than using a 110 cartridge film camera with precisely no functions or controls other than not letting you wind more than one frame at a time (a basic function that the Holga 120N lacks, but which also gives you more freedom for creative expression.
I still have many of the prints from these cameras in albums that date back to the late 1990s and early 2000s. The “unique” look of film that is so often touted by fans of “analogue” photography is certainly there, but so are the clear results of an inability to take any control of the camera, such as unwanted blur and over or under exposure.
After gaining all my knowledge and experience on digital cameras, I thought it was about time to see whether the new-found interest in analogue cameras was worth looking into. My experiments with the Holga 120N, which started from a simple desire to try out “Holgaramas” left me disappointed. You get what you pay for, which in the case of the Holga is not very much. At least as far as the camera is concerned. Buying and developing 120 film is an entirely different matter when you may only get two or three frames from a 16 shot roll that might be usable. So my attention wandered to an affordable 35mm camera with a full manual mode and I inevitably stumbled across the Canonet QL17, also known as the “Texas Leica”.
Finding a Canonet QL17
I scoured my annual second-hand photo fair in Vevey, Switzerland and found precisely zero Canonets. The best place to look if you are serious is on Ebay, where second-hand cameras are big in Japan. All the listings are by professional companies that deal solely in second-hand camera gear and have their own temperature controlled warehouses. They have a clear grading scale so that you know the condition of what you are bidding on before you start looking at the photos. I would recommend taking a good look at the product shots, however, as there may be a tiny defect visible on the camera or the lens (although this is usually indicated).
You’ll find a choice of the original steel housing with exposed brushed steel or an all-black version. I opted for the latter in a near-mint version, which cost me around 200 Swiss francs plus delivery and a further 20-30 francs of import duty for which I received a separate invoice from Fedex a few weeks after buying the camera. It came well-sealed in a protective packaging and is in pretty good condition.
Using the canonet QL17
After watching some Youtube videos and given that the QL in the Canonet QL17 stands for “quick load”, I thought that using the camera would be easy. Perhaps it is for someone who has a bit more patience and common sense than me but I ended up ruining the first two rolls of film I shot; the first by not pressing the button on the underside of the body before rewinding the roll and then wondering what that horrible tearing sound was; the second by somehow not even managing to load the film correctly.
Once you’ve got the hand of loading and unloading film, there is not much more you need to know. Set the film speed using the finnicky switch on the lens and you’re good to go. You can get an expensive adapter so that you can use pen cell batteries for the auto exposure mode, but where’s the fun in that? I tried to stick to the “Sunny 16” rule for my first few rolls, using the reciprocal of the film speed at f16 in sunny conditions, then stepping down according to the light. The big challenge here is determining what is actually sunny and what isn’t (see the sample photos below). I’m used to shooting digital on a tripod, so long exposures are my thing, which meant it took some getting used to the more limited range of shutter speeds.
The rangefinder focussing was also something new for me but it’s pretty intuitive: move the focus ring to line up the centre image with the surrounding image and bingo! Or, unless you are shooting something quite close up and with a large depth of field, just leave it on infinity.
