There’s an element of film that works so well with day to day life. No need for them to be perfect, award winning images. No editing. No scrolling through 15 versions of nearly the same photo on our phones. Really, we just want something fun to remember these days by.
Grab a camera and a roll of film, take a couple shots, send off the film and get your photos back a few weeks later. It’s like Christmas every time we get to flip back through them, seeing how things turned out and remembering the events.
Which brings us to one of our favorite film cameras, the Canon Demi EE17. It’s not perfect by any means. It doesn’t give you a ton of control while shooting, manual focusing with the distance markings is a little tricky, and the lens is certainly not gonna win any sharpness awards. But what it lacks in specs, it makes up for with heart and simplicity and the pure fun of shooting it.
The Canon Demi is a half-frame film camera from 1966. The photos it takes are half of the normal 35mm size, meaning that you actually get twice as many photos per roll. That means that throwing in a 36 exposure roll suddenly gives you 72 shots and feels way more inviting to experiment and play around than most film cameras. Another cool thing about half-frame cameras? Film labs still scan your film at 36 exposures, which means each scan is a two-photo dyptich. It’s a ton of fun to set up and tell little two-shot stories within the whole roll of film and really changes alot of how you think about shooting.
As far as bells and whistles go though, it’s not completely lacking. The in camera meter is actually quite accurate in our experience so far. You can shoot in full manual mode if you like but it also has a shutter priority mode by turning the aperture dial on the front of the lens to “Auto.” This allows you to simply set your shutter speed and the camera will pick the correct aperture. The fact that it sports a pretty fast f/1.7 lens means that as long you’re shooting with 400 speed or higher film, you can come away with a good exposure most of the day until it gets dark.
Overall, it’s just a beautiful, fun, little camera that’s easy to operate and throw in a backpack or pocket. And seeing the shot count climb into the 60s and 70s on a roll of film never gets old.
And here’s a few photos from a roll this past summer. We brought it along rock climbing and to summer camp and to a couple shoots and the Minnesota State Fair. They’re all shot on some old expired film so the colors are a little wonky and the exposure sometimes doesn’t do quite what you’d expect but, to be honest, that’s half the fun, and we still love how they turned out.
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