35mm Lenses

The Nikon FM is All the 35mm Film Camera You Really Need
2200 1237 Josh Solomon

My eyes drifted from one storefront to the next, my stomach grumbling in the late spring heat. For days I’d been craving a taco, a dish so common in my home city that they may…

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A Year with the Leitz Summicron R 50mm F/2 Lens
2200 1467 James Tocchio

Made to fit Leica’s R mount SLR cameras, Leitz R series lenses don’t enjoy the fanfare heaped on their M mount brethren. No surprise; Leica shooters skew toward rangefinders, and sticker shock keeps kids looking…

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Diving Deep with Nikonos – A Brief History of Nikon’s Underwater Cameras
2200 1238 James Tocchio

I watched with helpless horror as my camera fell, seemingly in slow-motion, fumbled from the uppermost point of a rough stone jetty. It tumbled and bounced from rock to rock on a plummeting course to…

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The Alpa 10D – Hand-Made Mechanical 35mm Film SLR from Switzerland
2200 1238 James Tocchio

I’ve been shooting an Alpa 10d for a year now, and every camera geek I’ve shown it to has asked the same question. “What’s that?” This is no great surprise. Today Alpa makes cameras that…

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Canon’s Canonet Rangefinder Does the Impossible – A Canon Camera That’s Not Boring
2200 1238 Chris Cushing

Canon makes boring cameras. Sometimes they make really boring cameras. I have an F-1 and I love shooting it, but like many Canons, it simply cannot be name-dropped. It’s a bit like trying to impress your coworkers…

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Minoltina P Camera Review – A Mostly Forgotten Full Frame Compact from Minolta
2200 1238 James Tocchio

Editorial discretion at Casual Photophile dictates that we don’t write about every camera ever made, and the cameras that we do write about don’t necessarily need to be “the best.” Our only requirement of the…

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A Week Away with the Contax T – a Perfect Travel and Street Rangefinder Camera
2000 1125 James Tocchio

Three film cameras; ten rolls of film. That’s what I packed for a recent week away. Among these cameras was the Contax T, an unbelievably compact 35mm film rangefinder that somehow marries luxurious excess to…

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Pentax Spotmatic Camera Review – One of the Longest-Lived Mechanical Cameras Ever Made
2000 1125 Chris Cushing

Volkswagen produced the Beetle in one form or another for more than six decades. Six decades of building one of the most simple, spartan family cars on the planet. And the Beetle outlasted every single…

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Zeiss Ikon ZM 35mm Rangefinder Review – Everything a Rangefinder Should Be
2000 1125 Dustin Vaughn-Luma

A few months ago, I sang the praises of the Zeiss C Biogon 35/2.8 M mount lens. In that earlier review, I spoke to my wife’s sixth sense and how she dealt me a whopper…

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Nikon Approaches its High Water Mark with the N90s – Camera Review
2000 1125 Jeb Inge

There was a time when Nikon was the undisputed ruler of the camera kingdom. The length of that dominance spans decades during which the brand produced some of the finest SLRs ever made, in machines…

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Jupiter-12 35mm F/2.8 Lens Review – Playing Russian Roulette with a Zeiss Copy
2000 1119 Josh Solomon

There is perhaps no more controversial, polarizing, and confusing subject in vintage photography than Russian lenses. For as many articles and forum threads that lionize the Russian lenses as dirt cheap Zeiss-killers there are just…

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Eastman Kodak Double-X (5222) – a Cinematic Black and White Film
2000 1123 Josh Solomon

The word “cinematic” can be pretty vague. It’s one of those meaningless filler words that can be applied to anything and that tells you absolutely nothing about what you’re looking at. Oh look at this…

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James Lager’s Leica An Illustrated History is the Book Every Leica Fan Needs to Own
2000 1125 James Tocchio

There are lots of books covering the famous red dot from Germany, and most Leica fans are dedicated enough that their shelves hold more than a few of these, but there’s just one set that…

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Topcon RE Super 35mm Film SLR Camera Review – The Greatest Loser
2000 1123 Josh Solomon

History, according to a popular truism, is written by the victors. And so it is in the world of cameras. Our victors? Nikon, Canon, Leica, etc. Info on those manufacturers still operating today is plentiful,…

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