As I wrote in my last blog post, I’m currently looking into getting a film rangefinder such as the Bessa R3a. Obviously, such cameras don’t come cheap, and I’ve been looking into ways to make it worth my while (and money!). I uncovered (somehow, whilst browsing around) [this project].
Now, I know the article is rather explicit in saying that one should use a Leica, but I quite frankly don’t have the money to buy one, and believe that a camera such as the Bessa R3M (similar to the R3a, but with no auto-exposure) would be an ideal camera to complete the project with. As the writer quite rightly points out in his [next article], Leica cameras hold their value extremely well, and you could quite easily re-sell the camera for what a price very close to what you bought it for. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no way I’d be able to fork out for a £2500 camera unless I got like two full-time jobs or something silly along those lines, so I think a £300-400 Bessa will have to do.
It is advised in the original article that one should shoot as many rolls of film per week as possible. This is a pretty large expenditure, but I imagine that I would purchase a box of 10 rolls of whichever film I decide to use per month. This would probably amount to around £35 a month for the raw film, and approximately another £35 a month for processing costs. The article recommends getting 1-6 “work-prints” per film – I would not get prints of these photos, but instead upload them to Flickr, so I would effectively be uploading between 10 and 60 photos a month. Every month, I would pick out the two most interesting photos (as calculated by Flickr) from what I had uploaded that month, and get prints made of them.
The monthly cost would come to around £85 a month, with an initial outlay of around £800 for a camera and lens, and £200-250 for a film scanner.
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I would most likely get a 50mm lens. Or possibly a 40mm lens. Not 100% sure on that one.)
