Featured item
The item-specific stuff
Item description/cosmetic
Fujica ST605N 35mm SLR camera body, in chrome and black. M42 screw mount. For reasons I can’t always fully articulate, I love Fujis. A lot. No doubt it’s partly sentimental – I inherited one from my grandfather which I still use regularly – but there’s also something about the simplicity of the design, the intuitive user interfaces, the feel of the camera in the hands, and the fantastic Fujinon lenses, that combine to make a fantastic photo-taking experience, and more often than not, fantastic pictures to match. They also happen to have the brightest viewfinders available to M42 users. Admittedly, the Fujica M42 cameras don’t have the quietest of shutters (more a “clang” than a “chock”), and, since they were made strictly for the amateur market, they don’t have the build quality of a Spotmatic. (Not really an issue, unless you plan on travelling back to the early 1970s and taking up a job as a press photographer...) But I think these cameras are criminally under-rated as shooters for beginners to advanced amateurs. Frankly, though I use my far more high-end Olympus OMs for tricky metering situations, my Fujis have given me almost all of my best photographs, from family portraits to landscapes. The ST605(N) is the simplest of the lot, with its all-mechanical design and traditional stop-down metering, unlike many of its big brothers, which use a proprietary method for open-aperture metering and therefore require Fuji lenses ...