The Listing
It was a blurry photo. Genuinely bad. The kind of listing that most people scroll past in two seconds because it’s just trash nobody wants.
But I saw it: Canon XT. $20. Untested. No battery. No memory card.
And i messaged the seller.
When you’ve been refreshing Marketplace for three months looking for anything with a lens mount, up to this point i’ve only owned phone cameras and a point and shoot my parents got back in 2005.
Making It Work
The camera arrived with no lens, no battery and no CF card. No camera store is selling the 20 year old battery model it needed. So I had a marketplace seller 3D-print a dummy battery shell, wired it to a power adapter, and held my breath.
The shutter fired, it fired with that oh so weird shutter that only a mother could love, but it was my camera and it meant that i had the entire EF mount as my oyster to manipulate light to my desire.
The Lens Situation
The resulting images were soft, vignetted, and full of flares. They were also some of my favorites.
What It Taught Me
Any camera is better than no camera. That’s obvious advice, but there’s a second thing it taught me that’s less obvious: constraints make you more creative, not less.
The $20 Canon XT is still a good camera for many things to come and i hope it lasts a lifetime under my care.