5 Frames with Contax T and Fomapan 200

It’s been years since I shot 35mm film. With costs rising, and mediocre flatbed scans as my output, I was easily convinced that the format was not worth the effort. I had some wonderful medium format and digital cameras to use instead.

Two things brought me back round. One was that I had a whim to put a roll through a family heirloom Pentax K1000. I had my local lab handle scanning the roll for me and was pleasantly surprised by the results. The second was that I came across the Contax T.

To me the original T is a camera that is much more appealing than its later, more famous, siblings. It’s smaller, has an interesting clamshell design, and gives me a real rangefinder so I know what I’m actually focusing on. It has the same lens as the T2 and T3, the well reputed Carl Zeiss Sonnar 38mm f/2.8. On top of this Ken Rockwell described it as a “rich man’s vacation camera“. I was sold.

For months the eBay alert and regular scanning of camera dealer websites hadn’t turned up anything. One listing had no pictures and a price more suited to the fashionable T2 and T3 models. Eventually I got what I was after.

Shortly after receiving the camera and rattling through a test roll, I headed for a weekend in Cornwall. It’s a long, beautiful, journey on the train, and I wanted to load some colour film on arrival. This gave me a handful of frames on a roll of Fomapan 200 to get through on the train.

The Contax T gives you just enough options to control exposure. The 4 LEDs in the right of the viewfinder tell you if the camera will overexpose at 1/500, expose correctly between 1/500 and 1/125, expose correctly between 1/125 and 1/30 or expose slower than 1/30. A slightly awkwardly placed “+1.5” button on the top of the camera gives you the only option to compensate for the camera’s basic center-weighted meter, but gives you a simple way to handle backlit subjects.

The top shutter speed of 1/500 is more limiting than I’m used to, but the more comfortable I got with the camera the less I worried about checking the LEDs in the viewfinder. Just following “Sunny 16 Rule” I’d know what aperture settings would be reasonable to use. I frequently take shots that the camera says will be overexposed, knowing that they’ll only be very mildly overexposed, especially in the context of film latitude.

For the shots pointing out of the window I wanted to expose for the outside, leaving my fellow passengers as silhouettes. It also happens that this is the easiest option allowing me to just focus and shoot, knowing the camera will produce this kind of exposure by default in such circumstances.

I’m now ten rolls further along my journey with the Contax T and am still having a great time with my rediscovery of 35mm.

Thanks for reading. You can find me on Flickr.

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