Chinon CE-4 SLR 35 mm still camera

The first camera that I bought myself.  A mostly manual 35 mm SLR camera, though it offers an automatic exposure-time mode, but I rarely use it.  I prefer full manual control—by the time you've checked what the automatic system are going to do, and if it's got it right, and tweaked it, you might as well set things manually.  This camera is from about 1986, and it only uses the battery for exposure operations, winding and focus is manual.  Quite a few of the photos on this website will have been taken using this camera.

It has quite a nice metering system, with a series of dots representing exposure (current exposure time and output from the light meter) that quickly follow your adjustments to the iris (unlike the slowly floating meter needle on my Praktica camera).  When both dots are on the same marker, the exposure is set right (illustrated on the exposure page in the photography section of the website).

Focussing is relatively easy, with a split-circle, prism and ground-glass screen (illustrated on the focus page of the photography section).  Well, I haven't checked if it's really ground-glass, or plastic, but it works like that type of screen.  But, unfortunately, the viewfinder has some negative features:  I've seen larger split-circle focussing aids in other cameras, such as on my Praktica MTL3 camera, that are more helpful.  I've seen viewfinder screens that appear larger.  And you have to press hard up against it to see all of the screen—that means painfully grinding hard corners around the eyepiece into your head.

I have a 28 mm very wide angle lens, which is my current interest:  Shooting almost-extreme wide angle shots, but not quite fisheye-effect wide.  Either for wider views of something, where most lenses just can't get enough into the picture, or for close up shots with exaggerated perspective.  And I also have the usual 50 mm wide angle lens, and a 135 mm telephoto lens.

I'm not keen on tunnel-vision shots, so I don't usually use telephoto lenses unless I just can't get close enough.  And I don't care for zoom lenses for a few reasons:  They tend to have a very limited F-stop range, you lose a lot of light through them, the image is less sharp than a prime lens, and the zoom range isn't always very useful.  I don't do a lot of photography where I'd need to keep swapping lenses between wide and narrow angle, so I don't have the real need for using a zoom lens.

Unfortunately, in later years, it got mould inside it (the smell is horrendous).  It was left on the shelf with the lens off, we have evaporative airconditioning, and something inside it didn't like the moisture.