View From The Porch

Fountain pens, automatic watches, tube amps, revolvers, mechanical cameras...

There's a certain fascination with this bygone tech. I've gone on before about how I love the mechanical nature of the Leica III. If all you want to do is wind it up and click the shutter, that alone is enjoyable. Assuming, however, that you want to use it to actually make photographs, the process is a little more involved. Just getting the film into the camera with an old Barnack Leica can be an adventure for the uninitiated. (Get a trimming guide. You'll thank me later.)

So, cameras that used roll film (as opposed to sheet film, like that used in large format cameras) generally required the user to thread the end of the roll onto a takeup spool. In an attempt to make a more user-friendly volkscamera sort of experience, Kodak launched the 126 film format in the early Sixties.

Dubbed the "Instamatic", a name obviously intended to signify ease of use, the film was all spooled up in a little plastic cartridge which you could just drop into the camera and then remove when you'd shot up all the exposures. The film itself was about the same size as 35mm film, but the camera exposed square images on it.

About a decade later, Kodak followed up with a second Instamatic film format, the 110. This used film that was as wide as the 16mm film used in subminiature cameras, but with only one row of indexing holes. The frames were half the size of a 35mm negative (the same size as a current Micro Four Thirds camera sensor, coincidentally.)

To combat worries that the film would be too grainy if enlarged to a useful size, Kodak even came up with new emulsions that would permit decent sharpness with 5x7s, maybe even 8x10s with good glass.

Unfortunately the vast majority of 110 cameras were cheap, plastic-lensed abominations, and the reputation for taking poor pictures has stuck with the format. Most customers' 110 photos I printed at the lab were garbage.

What the 110 format allowed, though, was the first advent of the take-anywhere, truly pocketable camera. There were some decent ones on the market, too; built well, with quality glass.

Pentax made an entire interchangeable-lens SLR camera system in the 110. The lens that's on there is the standard prime, a 24mm f/2.8. (Since the negative is half the size of 35mm, that gives the same field of view as a 48mm lens on a regular full-frame camera.)

Interestingly, the shutter also functions as the aperture, so all lenses have the same maximum aperture of f/2.8. It's a real SLR, with a pentaprism, TTL light metering, the works. Pentax sold a suite of lenses, a flash, a motor-drive/grip, and other accessories. They made them from '78 until '85.
 
Rollei's A110 is a little metal brick of a camera that is slid closed and then open again to advance the film, like a Minox spy camera. The 23mm f/2.8 lens has a reputation for being one of the better 110 lenses made.

Fujifilm discontinued 110 film production in 2009, but you'll find some in cold storage on eBay and elsewhere, and Lomography started producing it in 2011. I just got a roll from Amazon that I'm going to use to test the little A110 and see if it works!
.

When I headed downtown to drop the TacCon film off at Roberts Camera, Bobbi asked if I'd do her a favor. She said she had a roll of medium format black & white film that she wanted to get developed. When I looked at it, it turned out to be a roll of Ilford XP2.

Downtown Indy, Christmas Eve 2014, Leica R4, Ilford XP2

Tennessee Tourist Shirt, Summer 2015, Canon EOS-1N, Agfapan 25

Film photography is getting popular enough again that new films are being released. Medium-format rollfilm is even seeing an uptick, and this is causing the photography equivalent of "It's a magazine, not a clip!"

See, hipsters are liberating medium format Bronicas and Mamiyas from used shelves at camera dealers, shooting roll film, and tagging the results on Instagram with "#120mm".

120 film is not "120mm". I know we call 135 film by the common nomenclature of "35mm", but 135 and 120 are not, in and of themselves, dimensional measurements of anything. They're just Kodak's old in-house designators for certain kinds of film:

"While I’d love to believe there’s some Alex Jones-esque illuminati back story contributing the number 120 to the Knights Templar, unfortunately it was merely a numbering system Kodak implemented to keep track of all the film formats they manufactured. There were many types of film since they were specific to different cameras back then so they needed to simplify their film ordering system.

So Kodak decided that the daylight-loading roll films on flanged spools would be numbered in the order of introduction, starting with the first Kodak film of this type introduced with the No. 2 Bullet camera in 1895 as number 101. Of all the medium format roll types that Kodak produced, only number 120 survived the test of time and is the only medium format film still being produced today."

When I got back into film photography back at the end of 2013, it was mostly by accident; the result of buying a Leica R4 on a lark just because it was so cheap that I could afford what was once an unattainable object of desire just to put on my desk as a fidget spinner.

Pentax claims they're riding to the rescue of film photography, which has held on thus far largely by cannibalizing the graveyards of a dead film camera industry.

"Film is popular again, especially with young people. However, old film cameras are becoming harder to repair as parts become scarce and the people who repair them retire, taking their knowledge with them. Consequently, film camera prices have increased, as has the cost of film itself.

To address these concerns, and no doubt to capitalize on what Ricoh sees as a business opportunity, Pentax has now launched an initiative to create, not just one, but an entire range of new film cameras."

I worked for several years in an assortment of one-hour photo labs. At the time, the machines we used were big, clanking Noritsus, and the process of developing the film and the photos themselves was largely automated, but the actual printing of the picture still required the negatives to be fed one at a time through the printer and the button pressed by hand.

How involved the process was was up to the crew who was doing it. It could range from just poking the button, to at least inputting the recommended color correction for the type of film in question, to actually looking at each individual negative glowing in the window and adjusting color balance and exposure based on what you saw there.

I prided myself on my ability to glance at a negative and perform reasonably good eyeball adjustments on the fly. The results were measured by the lack of prints that needed to be fed into the shredder and reprinted. This was easy to do on 35mm film with a bit of practice, but you know what was hard? This:
110 film was fortunately on the way out by the time I had to deal with it at work, so if it was more than a couple times a week that I had to squint at tiny negatives half the size of a postage stamp, then it was a bad week indeed. Further, I'm not going to suggest that there was automatically a correlation between the type of film a person was using and the quality of the images produced, but I am going to suggest that such was often the case.

Ever since the famous "You push the button, we do the rest!" Kodak Brownie democratized photography by allowing Any School Boy or Girl to push the button, people have been snapping unfocused, badly-exposed pictures of... well, frequently it was impossible to decipher what exactly it was they were trying to take a picture of. If a photograph requires a subject, then most of the stuff I looked at while seated at the controls of that Noritsu 901 was just exposed film.

Film purists decry the cell phone camera as some final perversion of photography, but I maintain that that point was reached with Kodak's Disc cameras of the early Eighties. If we were to plot a line of imaging technologies from the Lascaux cave paintings to whatever is the current ne plus ultra of photography, the Disc camera surely represents some sort of nadir. And yet, even given the truly awful pictures I've seen come from those chintzy little abominations, I'm sure someone, somewhere was taking good shots with them. I mean, some of my favorite photos have been taken with some truly subpar equipment...

Kodak EasyShare V1073

Nikon Coolpix S6500

Nikon Coolpix S6500

Samsung Galaxy SII

I'm getting back into film partly for the nostalgia, partly because I buy into the whole "slow photography" woo-woo a little bit, and partly because I like the process and the gear. The clicks as you select the aperture, the glide of the focus ring, the sense of coiling and storing energy as you thumb the winding lever for the next shot...

It's like driving stick shift; in this day of twin-clutch automatic transmissions, there's no performance advantage to the classic manual, but a certain amount of interaction with the machine is lost. I suppose a vocal few probably lamented the loss of the magneto advance control on the dashboard of cars, too, claiming it was an essential part of driving. Maybe it was, or maybe the ideal machine really is the one that translates our thoughts into reality as transparently as possible. Which is the Perfect Vehicle: An MG-TD or Scotty's transporter? I don't pretend to have the answer to that question.

When I read these words at Leicaphilia...

"In 2013, 25% of all of these images made were taken with smartphones, presumably by folks who don’t think of themselves as “photographers.”  As a result of this image explosion and the technological advances making it possible, photography is no longer a specialist language. it is now a universal language, spoken via social media, most of it inconsequential chatter. We have entered the fast food era of photography."

...I had to wonder where he was when I was spending those Monday mornings after a big concert weekend, printing roll after roll of images consisting of a row of sharply-focused badly-overexposed heads seen from behind, with something going on only dimly glimpsed in the murky background far beyond them. I guess he was hanging out with photographers. Lucky bastard.
.

So I just found out that the Robert's Camera downtown develops film on site. I hadn't shot any film since late 2015 or early 2016 because I'd accumulated a ten-roll backlog and sending it off to The Darkroom three rolls at a time is a pain in the arse.

I dropped them all off at Robert's yesterday. The color will be done by Friday and the B&W by next week.

I busted out the EOS-1N in celebration!


The 1N is the second-to-last pro-grade film body produced by Canon. It was superseded by the EOS-1V in 2000, which remained in the catalog until earlier this year. The handling and controls are almost identical to the digital EOS-1DS MkII I've been using, so much so that I almost always catch myself "chimping" after shots, only to find myself staring at the camera's blank backplate.

If you already shoot a Canon EOS DSLR, this would be an easy way to get into film. Used ones are available for around two bills at the Amazon link above, and all your EF (but not EF-S) lenses will work on it. Even if you'd never shot film before in your life, loading and transport is completely automated.

Learning how to load film into a Barnack Leica is like trying to master origami, with the bonus that if you get it wrong, you trash your shutter. With this thing you just pull out a bit of leader to the handy marking inside the film compartment, close the back, and go. When it shoots the last image, it rewinds automagically. (I'll note that the camera calculates the number of shots you get by reading the DX code on the canister, rather than by the motor feeling tension on the spool, so no eking out that 37th or 38th exposure.)
.

If Nikon's Pronea 6i looked like a prototype of the future consumer-grade DSLR and Canon's EOS IX looked like a Nineties sci-fi movie prop, Minolta's Vectis S-1 looked like...well, it looks normal now. If I'm walking around with the Hasselblad Lunar or the Fuji X-E1, someone inevitably asks "Oh, is that a film camera?" Despite it actually being a film camera, it's unlikely anyone will ask that about the Vectis.

It looks pretty much like a generic digital MILC or Bridge Camera from about ten years ago, not a film camera from 1996.

The lens this one shipped with was Minolta's V-mount "travel zoom". At first blush 25-150mm sounds like a super useful focal length range, but remember that shooting in "H" mode with APS film results in a crop factor of approximately 1.25X, so you have a field of view equivalent to about a 31-180ish lens.

It's a slow lens, too. Maximum aperture at the wide end is only f/4.5, and that falls off pretty quickly as you dial in the zoom and past about 55mm you're looking at a maximum aperture of f/6. The lens is also unusual in having no provision for manual focusing. Shooting the Vectis S-1 is a reminder that autofocus was still fairly new in 1996. It hunts a bit and is slow to focus; the 25-150mm is no sports lens, but that's okay, considering the camera's motor drive might deliver a single frame every second. It may look more modern than the EOS IX or the Pronea, but shooting it is a trip back in time.

The test roll, which is at Roberts now, was Fuji 100 that came in a sleeve of five, and the seller claimed had been cold stored. I manually set the ISO to 64 to compensate for the age of the film and, combined with the pig-slow apertures, exposure times on a sunny day were getting slower than 1/90th any time a small cloud crossed the sun. This camera, of course, predates any kind of stabilization in the lens...

Despite the off-center viewfinder, this is an actual single lens reflex camera, it just uses a rather more exotic arrangement of mirrors than the usual pentaprism or pentamirror. Despite that, the finder is crazy bright and features about 98% coverage, at a time when a Canon EOS Rebel gave you a dim 90% finder.

The film loads in that little trap door on the side of the camera. You press the blue "eject" button and the camera sort of whirs and chortles to itself for a second and then pops the hatch open to receive film. (It came with a manual so I need to read what you do if the two CR2 batteries give up the ghost while you have film in the camera...)

The thumb wheel will alter the aperture if you're shooting in aperture priority, shutter speed if you're shooting in shutter priority, and if you want to shoot in full stick-shift mode, the thumb wheel controls shutter speed unless you hold down the exposure compensation button while spinning it, and then it changes the aperture and leaves you longing for the dual control wheels on Nikon's Pronea 6i.

Minolta rated the camera as "splashproof" but I have yet to risk my $20 investment by splashing anything on it.

When it launched, it was not $20, but closer to $300. This was half the price of the Nikon and a third the cost of Canon's stainless EOS IX, which was so expensive it was only on the market for two years before being yanked in favor of something dumber and plastickier.

Minolta's V-series lenses are currently completely useless without a Vectis. There's no point in making adaptors for them because even the ones with "manual" focus use a focus-by-wire ring and the lens needs to be communicating with the camera for this to function. (Minolta and Nikon were the only ones to make APS-specific lenses, although Nikon's used the company's standard F-mount. Minolta engineered an entirely new mount for the Vectis...and collapsed and was absorbed by Sony in seven years. "Vectis wrecked us.")
.

You could be forgiven for thinking the Canon EOS IX is the "EOS 9", but it's actually the "Eye Ecks". That stands for "Information Exchange", and that's a key feature of one of the last...and shortest-lived...film formats out there, the Advanced Photo System format (APS for short.)

126 Instamatic, 110 Instamatic, Disc...each were an attempt to give casual shooters an easy-to-use form factor that didn't involve having to thread leaders on takeup spools while simultaneously preventing the clumsy-fingered from putting a thumb through fragile shutter components while loading the camera.

While indeed easy to use, these formats suffered from iffy image quality, especially the 110 and Disc, due to tiny negatives. The APS, on the other hand, had negatives almost the size of regular 35mm film.

The mode dial is relocated to the back of the camera because there's a little hatch on top where it normally would be on a Canon body. You just pop that open, drop the cassette (which has no exposed leader) in, and the camera does the rest.

Higher-end APS cameras, like this one, read and write magnetic data off the negatives, hence "Information Exchange". You can rewind mid-roll, and then reload it and it will advance to the first unexposed frame. It can record other data, like date/time or exposure settings.

All this was made possible by rapid advances in digital technology in the Eighties and Nineties, and those same advances would, of course, also lead to the creation of imaging sensors that would supplant film.

While 35mm film is still being made, APS sank without a ripple in 2011. This means that any you buy today is at least half-a-decade expired. The Fujifilm Nexia D100 I got claimed to have been cold-stored, and seemed to work okay. Colors were a bit muted.



It's a crapshoot on film, but on the Canons, at least, the APS cameras use standard EF-mount lenses, with a 1.2x crop factor. (This makes the excellent EF 40mm f/2.8 pancake a 50mm equivalent, BTW...) Similarly, the Nikon Pronea 6i uses Nikon's F-mount. Both the EOS IX and Pronea 6i use a pair of CR123 batteries, which is something kept in ample stock at Roseholme Cottage.

With the discontinuation of the film, the cameras are available for next to nothing, so it's a cheap experiment.
.

So, as a big fan of always having a camera with me that's not my cell phone, I've spent the last few years with a succession of tiny digicams, the two most recent being a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W650 and now a Nikon Coolpix S6500. It was therefore pretty much inevitable that, once I got my toes wet back in the film photography pool, I'd start looking for a little camera to complement the SLRs; something I could one-hand while bicycling on the Monon or dangle from a wrist strap instead of hanging around my neck.

Unlike more substantial SLRs, the vast majority of point-and-shoot 35mm cameras were pretty ephemeral. Whereas a Canon AE-1 was likely to be put in the attic when it was no longer in use, a Snappy 50 was a lot more likely to go in the trash or get handed to the kids to play with. Combine that with the fact that most of these cameras were both highly automated and yet built to a price point, and it makes functioning survivors from the more affordable end of the market scarcer than their vast production numbers and fairly recent chronology would have you believe. The biggest difference between a "single-use camera" and a $50 blister-pack P&S from the early '90s is that the former made no pretenses as to its disposability.

On the other end of the price curve, there are plenty of high-quality small point-'n'-shoot 35s still around, but be ready to do battle with fanbois on eBay, because you will be fighting with film hipsters over pocket jewelry like the Ricoh GR1 or Minolta TC-1.

The Precious, yes! We wants it, Gollum, and now we has it!

The Kyocera-built Contax minis are right up there, with the least expensive of them being the basic TVS, which can be had for ~$100 with a bit of luck. Given its initial retail price and Porsche Design-influenced titanium curves, this is a relative bargain. The newer TVS II and III will run double or triple the money, but I was plenty happy to score a regular TVS from a seller in Japan.

The TVS is bigger than the diminutive Coolpix, but still tiny compared to an average-sized SLR like the Canon A-1.

Of course, even a small film camera is going to be big compared to a current pocket digital. First, you have to accommodate a 35mm film cartridge and its takeup spool, which sort of dictates your base dimensions. Then you need a battery with enough juice to drive the focusing and film transport motors, and you've got to put that somewhere in the camera. The TVS is small compared with even small film SLRs like the Olympus OM, but compared to the Nikon Coolpix, which will almost rattle around in a cigarette pack, it's a bit large.

Still, I'm looking forward to shooting some film with it, hopefully on warmer days, strolling through the city. (And those looks... I'm not going to even pretend I'm immune to the Contax's pretty face.)
.

Once upon a time, taking pictures on film was just photography. It's how you made pictures.
There was nothing more cringe for me than going to pick up some prints from a 1hr lab and finding the color off. It told me the staff just didn't care.

The APS film format came and went while I wasn't paying attention. It showed up a couple years after I'd stopped working in the photo biz, and by the time I was paying attention to cameras again, it was 2001 and I was buying a Sony Mavica digital camera and film photography itself was collapsing precipitously.

The Nikon looks like a regular SLR, while the EOS IX is self-consciously '90s cyberpunk

The name survives because what we currently refer to as "crop sensor" DSLR & mirrorless cameras use a sensor that gives a "crop factor" of 1.5X (1.6X on Canon) and is referred to as "APS-C".

As it turns out, there are three ways you can shoot a picture on an APS film camera. The standard one, which uses the entire negative, is in a 16:9 aspect ratio and called "H" on the camera, for "High Definition", since HD video was a new and novel thing at the time. There was also a mask that would crop the sides off the image to give a more traditional 4:3, referred to on the camera as "C" for "Classic". Finally there was a "P" mode for "Panorama", which aggressively cropped the top and bottom of the image for a 3:1 ratio, which returned 4x11" prints.

Note that the image was only cropped in the viewfinder, using LCD or mechanical masks, or sightlines, and the instructions for each print size were encoded on the film for the lab's printer to read. The actual negatives were all recorded full size for each image.

The name "APS-C" survives as the most common sensor size in DSLRs because sensors were crazy expensive to make. Camera companies had experience projecting images onto a piece of film this size, so there we were. As sensors became relatively cheaper, and relatively easier to make efficiently, ones that are the same size as legacy 35mm film became more common. (This is because lenses are the important thing in photography. Get bought into a lens ecosystem, and you're likely there for a while.)

Incidentally, APS-H lived on into the digital era as well. While Nikon's first pro digital body, 1999's watershed D1, used an APS-C sized sensor and didn't increase the size until going full-frame with the D3 in 2007, Canon thought that pro photogs needed more sensor real-estate. The sensors in Canon's 1D, their first in-house pro body in 2001, were larger, giving a crop factor of 1.3X. Because of this crop factor similarity, they were called "APS-H", even though they used a standard 4:3 ratio.

To give an idea of how much the price of the sensor affected the price of the camera, the APS-H 4MP EOS 1D dropped in 2001 for $6500, and a year later the full frame 11MP EOS 1Ds joined it in Canon's lineup for a whopping eight grand. That's better than $200/MP or, looked at another way, seven dollars per square millimeter of additional sensor size. At seven bucks a square millimeter, the head of a pin would be $28 and a penny would be almost two grand.

(I had thought that the Canon EOS IX and Nikon Pronea 6i were the only semi-serious APS film SLRs out there, but it turns out there's another!)
.

So, the intense battles among the Japanese camera manufacturers for SLR market share in the 1970s resulted in a saturated market. Lots of people wanted to take pictures, but the SLR camera, festooned as it was with dials and knobs and buttons, was off-putting to somebody who wanted to take pictures of their kid's birthday parties and the occasional vacation picture at the beach. On the other hand, point-and-shoot cameras were one-and-done affairs; sell one of those, and that's it, whereas if you sell an SLR, you're opening the customer up to repeated purchases of lenses and flashes and accessories...

This led to an interesting offshoot in the evolution of SLRs: Simple, practically point-and-shoot, SLRs marketed to beginners. While modern DSLR cameras certainly can be, and are, marketed to beginners, they typically retain the ability for full manual control. These older film ancestors were... different in that respect.
The Nikon EM, introduced in 1979, was a departure from traditional Nikon SLRs, which had been tank-like, all-metal things. The EM was smaller, lighter, and less expensive than usual, containing a large amount of plastic in its construction. The body's lines were sculpted by Italian industrial designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, better known for the Lotus Esprit, BMW M1, and DeLorean. Internally, it was conceptualized as an "SLR camera for women".

The top of the camera, instead of the usual array of knobs, had a dial for setting the film speed and a simple selector for auto exposure, a manual 1/90th second exposure (the flash synch speed, but would also work in case the batteries went tango uniform) and Bulb, for using a cable release.

The shooter still had to dial in the aperture, but the camera would pick the shutter speed, and beep politely to let you know if the required exposure time would be 1/30th of a second or longer, which could cause blur from camera motion. The camera used the entire array of standard Nikon "F-mount" lenses, thus serving as a gateway drug to further Nikon purchases.

In 1983, Canon released the T50. This camera goes several steps further than the EM in the easy-to-use department. For starters, it has a built-in motor drive, so film loading and advancing is automated, but you still have to rewind manually at the end of the roll.

The T50 uses Program mode for all shooting: Set the aperture ring on the lens to "A" and the camera handles all the aperture and shutter speed chores. All you have to do is drop the film in and manually set the ISO, focus, and watch out for the blinking "P" in the viewfinder, which lets you know if a shot is no bueno.

These cameras are generally available for a song and the best part is that they use Canon's FD mount. Unlike the Nikon F, when Canon went to autofocus SLRs, they completely changed their lens mount (from the FD to the EF) and the orphaned lenses are dirt cheap. By way of illustration, I picked up a 70-210 Macro and a 100-300, both in excellent condition with front and rear caps, for $100 shipped. For the pair.

Minolta's Maxxum 3000i, released in 1988, is entirely automated. Drop the film in and it loads itself, reads the DX code on the canister to set film speed and is ready to go. It's an autofocus and the lens mount is still in use as the Sony "α" mount. If the Nikon EM was a synchromesh manual gearbox and the Canon T50 was a paddle-shifted twin-clutch manual, this is an actual automatic transmission.



The top of the camera is practically devoid of controls. There's an off-on switch, a button for the self-timer, and a button that selects "Hi Speed" mode, which is basically a shutter-priority mode that selects the fastest shutter speed to stop action.

All in all, it's about the least-intimidating film SLR I'm ever seen. No wonder this Lomographer loved it; it fits in with the Lomo "just shoot" ethos perfectly.
 
.

Good article at Popular Photography on some tips and pointers for shooting with expired film.

If you’re shooting film already, you know that you need to develop a tolerance for uncertainty.

Film can be fogged, or wrecked in development. Your shutter might drag or the mirror not swing up correctly. Without an LCD screen built into the camera, you have no way to check whether you got the shot—you’ve put your faith in your camera, your skill, and your film.

It’s like doing a trust fall every time you release the shutter.

Using expired film compounds the uncertainty, like jumping from an airplane with a parachute you just bought at an army surplus store. You don't know who packed it or what it may have suffered in all the years since then. Okay, maybe it's not that bad—there is a lot less to go wrong with a roll of film than a parachute, and a lot less riding on it—hopefully.

This is a necessity if, like me, you've been bitten by a strange desire to fiddle around with some APS cameras, since the newest APS film is a decade past its use-by date...


.

What's the most humiliating moment you've had at a camera store? I ask, because I just experienced mine.

The other day I popped the finished roll of Ilford HP5 in its green & white canister out of the Nikon N80, where I'd been using it to experiment with the red filter, and a roll of Kodak T-Max out of the F4 where I'd been ditto with a yellow filter.

As I'm getting ready to head out the door, I see another green & white canister with no leader sticking out, sitting there on the shelf. It had been behind a camera, and I thought "Huh, another roll of Ilford," and tossed all three canisters in the bag to take to the store.

I hand them to the dude at the lab counter at Roberts on Friday morning, and he tosses them into the envelope, saying "The two black and white rolls will be ready next Friday, and the color will be ready Monday."

"Wait, color?"

"Yeah, this one's Fuji 200 color film."

Ah. The green and white canister I grabbed off the shelf must have been the Fuji. I could have sworn it was Ilford HP5. "I don't even know what's on that color roll, dude. I only use those for test rolls and I can't remember what camera I would have shot that in. It's a mystery roll."

Monday afternoon Roberts sent me the scans off the roll of color film...

D'OH!

I was almost too embarrassed to show my face in the store this morning.


Yes, I'd gone to Holliday Park and shot up most of a roll of color film through a red filter, trying to get dramatic sky behind the ersatz ruins. Because I'm an idiot and didn't keep better track of what film I'd put in the N80.

The funny part is that this isn't even an old 1980's vintage camera with electrical tape over the film window on the back to make up for light leaks caused by dodgy old seals around the window.

I got this camera from a friend who'd used it less than twenty years ago for work stuff, and the film window is uncovered because it doesn't leak. I'd just glanced at the window, saw "green & white", and thought "HP5"...because surely I wouldn't have Fujicolor 200 in a camera for anything other than a test roll.
.

1990 Canon EOS 10S 35mm on the left, 2004 Canon EOS 20D 8.2MP digital on right

Overheard at Castle Frostbite a couple weeks ago:

Lyra: (craning to see the back of the camera) "Can I see the picture?"

Me: "No."

Lyra: "Why not?"

Me: "Well, you see, a long time ago, before you were born..." 

The eponymous munchkins of The Munchkin Wrangler had never really been exposed to the concept of a film camera before.

Before heading out to New Hamster, I decided to acquire a more serious camera bag. My plan was to pack a film body along with the DSLR and a small 35mm P&S in case I got a chance to go play hipster street photographer in Lebanon or Hanover. After coonfingering a bunch of the choices at local camera store Roberts, I picked out a Lowepro Pro Messenger 200 as a well-made bag that would hold two bodies and a few lenses, plus all the ancillary gear, and not look terribly dorky while doing it or fall apart after a month's use.

Coolpix P-7000 on left, Ricoh GR1 on right

The P&S selection was easy: The GR1 is my fave little pocket 35mm camera. Picking the bigger film camera wasn't as easy. I anguished over the film SLR choice, dithering back and forth, and think I wound up choosing the wrong one for the trip. See, I brought the EOS 10S on the theory that it could share EF-mount lenses with the 20D and that would be very practical and pragmatic.

But if this was about practicality and pragmatism, I wouldn't be using film in the first place. The 10S is a fine camera, but I might as well be using the DSLR, given how little bond there is between me and it. I'd have gotten out and about and shot more pictures on film if I'd brought the A-1 and a couple of FD lenses for it. The 18-135 zoom is normally the only lens I take on vacation for the 20D anyway, so it's not like I needed extra EF lenses along.

Next trip I'll know better.
.

Mike at The Online Photographer talks about how long he's shot film versus how long he's shot digital, and he makes an interesting delineation in noting that, while he really caught the photography bug in 1980, he'd been taking pictures for nearly a dozen years before that.

That resonated with me, because while I started working in a photo lab in '90 and all my "serious photography stuff" happened between 1990 and 1993, I grew up with a camera around.

Dad worked in camera stores most of my childhood, and the first film I remember exposing was a roll of black and white Instamatic film on a field trip to the U-505 in first grade. I'd received the little GAF, with its very Seventies woodgrain trim for birthday or Christmas, and most of that first roll consisted of badly flash-burned pictures of the back of the classmate ahead of me in line as we shuffled through the submarine display at the museum.

In high school I'd graduated to some simple 35mm so I could bore people with vacation slides, and I took a darkroom class, but the only time I would have labeled photography as a hobby was that stretch from '90 through the very beginning of '93. Those were the years I had access to free processing, as well as employee discounts on film and printing. It's easy to forget, these days, that each press of the shutter button used to have an actual price tag.

Similarly, while I got my first digital camera in 2001, I wouldn't have described photography as any sort of hobby. I labored along with a series of point-and-shoots until taking the plunge on a couple of cheap used Rebel bodies in 2013.

But then I also started dabbling with film again back in 2015...

So that's twenty-two years with film, with maybe seven of it serious, and eighteen with digital, and six of that being serious.

Canon EOS 7D, EF 24-105mm f/4L IS

It's much the same way I look at the arc of my gun-owning/shooting. I have owned firearms since I turned eighteen, but the arc of my real growth as a shooter didn't begin until probably 2010 or so, when I really began seeking training and taking dry-fire practice seriously.
.

The Mustang on film, again. This time it was Ilford HP5 Plus in a Nikon N80. The N80 was the last prosumer-grade film camera offered by Nikon, launched in 2000 and officially discontinued in 2009. Shooting it is hardly different from shooting a Nikon DSLR, other than needing to open the back and drop in film.

You can compare the grain of the 400 ISO Ilford B&W film to the Ektar 100 color negative film from the last posted film shot of the Mustang here.
.

That's some sexy Nikon F5 product placement in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. When the movie came out in May of 1997, the F5 had been on the market for a year and was still the $3,000+ king of the camera hill. 3D color matrix metering, five autofocus points, built-in motor drive that could shoot at eight frames per second; the marketing slogan was "Imported From the Future".

There's one problem with the scene above, where the camera reaches the end of the roll of film and suddenly starts rewinding, startling the baby dinosaur by making the whirring mechanical buzz everyone in the theater would have been familiar with as "camera rewinding film".

Well, two problems, actually.

The first is that the F5 didn't automatically rewind its film at the end of a roll. You needed to tell it when you wanted it to rewind. As a matter of fact, since inadvertently bumping a rewind button at the wrong time could be an expensive disaster for a pro photographer, it required a complicated hand jive involving a shielded button and a locked lever at opposite sides of the camera's back. (This survives in the two-button setup to format cards in Nikon's pro digital bodies.)

The second is the noise the camera makes as it rewinds. Like I said above, everyone in the theater would know what it was because it was the sound Uncle Fred's Kodak made when he was done with a roll of film at cousin Suzy's birthday party. That's why the foley artist put it in there; it's the stock "camera rewinding" noise.

The Nikon F5, on the other hand, has a film transport so silent that unless you're in a very quiet room, you won't hear the camera rewinding at all. Other than the faint vibration in your hand, there will be no clue that the camera is silently whirring the film back into the canister for processing.
.