Irusia, welcome to Photrio, I hope your journey with us is a good and productive one.
Your plan is good. Can you tell us what your mother’s point and shoot camera is? The name and model number would help us so we can work out if you can easily use different film speeds.
As you already have a basic digital camera, I am assuming you have grown out of it and wish to progress to a better featured model. The GX9 camera looks appealing in the specification sheet as an advanced point and shoot digital camera with some quite advanced features. I am not a digital camera person, but looking at the specification sheet it seems that this would indeed be a very well equipped travel camera with the ability to do quite interesting photography whether you are travelling or not travelling.
The main difference between an SLR (Single Lens Reflex) and a range finder is that when you look through an eyepiece of an SLR you are looking through the lens. What you see is what you get and what you see, is what the film will see when you press the button.
With a rangefinder, the focusing window is usually near the edge of the camera and you see an approximate image of what the film will see. You focus by aligning up two images into a single image, then you use the viewfinder image to compose your picture. What you see, is not exactly what the film will see. After using a roll of film or two, you will quickly have an idea of where the image is missing and where the image is greater than what you see.
I would suggest if you do decide to try film photography more seriously, then an SLR is the better option. As you are located near Germany and may have access to their market, what we call an SLR is called a spiegelreflexcamera, which in direct translation to English is “Mirror Reflex Camera,” this is technically a very correct description as the image is reflected from a mirror onto more mirrors, so we see the image right way up.
I would think you will be exposing film and either developing it yourself or getting someone to develop it for you. Then you would scan the film and do the rest digitally. If you use colour film, then you will send the film away, if you use black and white (B&W) film then you can also send the film away, but this is sometimes more expensive than colour film.
Developing your own B&W film is quite easy and not that expensive to set up. The chemicals are generally available in kit form in that you buy a developer, stop bath and fixer chemical set. We can certainly help you if you wish to try doing this. To develop film you do not need a darkroom, 40+ years ago I loaded film at night in a completely dark room, sometimes in a wardrobe (closet to Americans) in the daytime.
As for which SLR, some are quite good because of their size, some are good because of their range of lenses and the price of these lenses. With regard to size, when the Olympus OM1 came out in the 70’s my then girlfriend immediately bought one. She was quite a small person and had very small hands, this made things very easy for her as all other SLR cameras at the time were quite big in comparison. This size thing may be relevant to you, I don’t know. Unfortunately Olympus cameras are in short supply and their lenses, although brilliant, are slightly more expensive than other brands.
In Australia where I live, Pentax and Nikon SLR cameras were the most sold, so the second hand market in this country is dominated by these two brands. I would suggest that if you can, go to a modern camera shop in your area and find someone who is middle aged to almost retirement age and ask them what was the most dominant camera in your country in the late 70’s through to the 90’s and if they were reliable. With that information, you should be able to make an informed decision of what to try and buy.
For a personal suggestion of which camera brand to purchase and going on one of your questions, the Nikon brand SLR cameras have the longest line of using the same lens mount. In short, a modern Nikon lens (Nikkor) will be able to mostly go on all of their older camera bodies and work well enough to use completely manually.
I hope this helps.
Mick.
