5 Rushed Frames with a Canon EOS3 and an EF 14mm f/2.8L ii.

A day when everything happened unplanned.
While developing some films for my son I had trouble loading the reel; was it me? the reel? the film? the camera?
I had recently bought a Canon EF 14mm f/2.8L ii USM lens.
And I had just taken my EOS3 out of storage and checked it over.

Thinking the best thing to do was try developing another roll of film I loaded the EOS3 with Rollei RPX100, mounted the 14mm lens and went for a quick walk through the woods before the rain arrived and then developed the film straight away.

It turned out all the trouble I had been having was the Minox’s fault with it having damaged the film edge (other old crappy plastic cameras are available and can be equally as bad).

I had last used the EOS3 in 2007 and packed it away after finally switching completely to digital. Everything seems to work fine and I managed to find most of the controls without too much trouble, the 5D mk iv I am currently using having a layout with enough in common to allow swapping between the two easily. As I remember the switch from film to digital was fairly seamless for the same reason.

When they were new the 14mm f/2.8L ii was always out of my reach, so I continued with a 20mm f/2.8 which is an excellent lens but one that never seems to have a wide enough angle of view for the photo I am trying to take. Second-hand 14mm lenses have come down in price considerably in the past couple of years, making it seem like a good time to buy one. I had been using it a bit but poor weather from the time of purchase and lack of suitable subjects meant not using it as much as I wanted to. I thought it would be interesting to see what results it gave with black and white film.

The answer is they came out sort of all right, but these woodland images could have been made with almost any other lens, and are not really what I had in mind when purchasing the 14mm. Plants, flowers, fungi and such like in context with their habitat and landscape was more what I was thinking of, and definitely in colour. I’m starting to find a few and to find what the lens is capable of.

Two things have occurred to me after using the lens more. The first is why on earth does the EF 14mm have autofocus? It seems bizarre when the whole point of the lens is that almost everything is in focus anyway, all the time. And the second is that a wider angle of view would be useful.

The EOS3 has gone back in storage for now, if I want to use a huge battery-powered monstrosity it may as well be a digital camera.

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