Canon FTb
This evening I had time for a bit more tabletop and product photography for this month's competition at Parkwood Camera Club. A few years ago, I found myself collecting several old classic film cameras, and although I sold most of them on, there are a few left hanging around. This is one of the early Canon SLRs, the FTb - a solid metal brick of a camera, and sporting an older breechlock 50mm f/1.4 FD lens. More use for repelling burglars than taking pictures these days, but a nice old thing to have around.
Introduced in 1971 as the successor to the FT QL, the Canon FTb sat just below the professional F‑1 and was aimed squarely at the keen amateur who wanted serious build quality without the system price tag. It kept things reassuringly simple: a fully mechanical shutter from 1 to 1/1000s, stop‑down or full‑aperture TTL match‑needle metering, and compatibility with both the then‑new FD lenses and older FL glass. The little “QL” badge on the front stands for Quick Load, Canon’s sprung pressure‑plate system that lets you just lay the film leader across the take‑up area, close the back and wind on, instead of threading it carefully into a slot. Hardly high tech by modern standards, but in the early 1970s, it was a genuine quality‑of‑life upgrade for anyone fumbling with film in the cold.
Production ran through most of the decade, with a lightly updated version appearing in 1973 – often called the FTb‑N – which added niceties like a plastic‑tipped advance lever, a revised stop‑down lever and a shutter‑speed display in the corner of the viewfinder. Paired with a fast 50mm f/1.4 FD breech‑lock lens, as here, it would have been a very desirable enthusiast’s kit in its day, the breech‑lock mount letting the lens stay put while only the locking ring rotates into place. Half a century later, there’s a certain charm in the way everything is still purely mechanical – no batteries required beyond the meter – and yet that solid lump of brass, glass and leatherette feels ready to go out and shoot another few decades’ worth of rolls.
Fujifilm X-E1, 35mm, Lightroom, Silver Efex Pro 2, Color Efex Pro 4
