It was finally time to take my old school Contax RTS out from the storage and put it though it’s pace again. Every year I go through this phase where I have to go back to the roots of photography. Last year I used a Canon EOS3, where as this year I went even further into the past.
Reason why I bought this type of camera was because of it’s heritage. It was highly regarded for it’s time, with the exquisite build quality and it’s compatibility with Zeiss lenses. If you lust for Zeiss’ superb lenses then a Contax is the best place to start. Zeiss were considered the best (along side with Leica), their lens optics are still regarded as the best to this day.
Alright, so where was I…
What makes me go back to film is how it behaves. Film has this texture, you can see it popping out of the page when printed, even more so when a method called cross processing is used to mix colours with a colour space. Film has this look we grew up seeing, but with digital everything changed that. Film wasn’t perfect, but that’s what distinguished it from digital. We can sort of fake the film grain, but what about that dirty bleach look that came with every exposure like red and green broke out into a fight. I LOVE that fight!