One of my favorite 35mm film SLR's is a Canon EOS Elan II. Very basic, good functions, reliable & somewhat contemporary. It's all plastic goodness. I primarily use it for street photography or when I'm using expired film and I want to make sure I use a camera that works!. Up to now I've always used it with a pancake 40mm f/2.8 lens shown in this picture.
However, I decided to mount it with a fairly inexpensive 3rd party, Vivitar 70-210mm f/4.5-5.6 lens. I RARELY if ever use long lenses on film cameras. I'm more of a 35-50mm street / snapshot shooter. I was given this lens a few years ago, so I figured I would give it a go.
The lens is surprisingly robust. It's not the fastest lens, but for street photography that isn't an issue. It's a pull / push zoom lens so it's extremely intuitive and easy to zoom. It has both AF/M settings to fit your shooting needs and a macro setting (which I didn't use). The AF was surprisingly fast. The only issue is that there is no zoom lock so when you hold the lens down (below horizontal) the lens barrel on my lens went all the way out to 210mm which looked kind of silly. This particular lens can easily be purchased online for under $100.
I took this combination out the other day loaded with a bulk loaded roll of Ilford XP2 Super 400. Once shot I developed the roll at home with Unicolor C-41 purchased from Roberts Camera. The results.
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