I have been buying film from Analogue Wonderland. They have a convenient arrangement whereby you buy film and they send it to you with a postage label so you can send the film back to them for developing and scanning.
Recently they arranged a photowalk in Cambridge with a small fee for participants. It came with the benefit of a free film and developing and scanning.
I was using the Nikon F80 I mentioned previously. It had a fault that I discovered when I got back the scans. I thought the film wind-on mechanism wasn’t working properly. But after more thought I realised the shutter wasn’t travelling across the frame completely. It was either sticking, or the timing was off, and that prevented light reaching the full frame.
So now the F80 on its way back to the seller for a refund.
The fault only affected some frames. Some frames were OK and here are some photos from the walk.
The man on the left is Chris Dommett, who had volunteered to run the photowalk. He turned up with rolls of film and identifying labels for each of our films. We handed him in our exposed film at the end of the walk, and Analogue Wonderland processed them.
The nearest subjects were each other, and that’s what I photographed for almost all the photos I took.
I took my little Ricoh GRIII digital camera and photographed Chris looking at me. And I photographed him showing some of the features of a camera to one of the participants. So the following two shots are digital
And now back to film and more shots of my fellow photographers on the walk. I wonder whether I will turn up in anyone else’s photos. Actually I know I will because at least one person asked if it was OK to take my photo. I just started taking photos without asking. This shot is when we were sitting down in a pub trying to work out exactly what the code meant, the code that was written in an email we had each received prior to the day. We had to write it on a slip of paper and put that in with the film when we gave the film to Chris at the end.
We agreed it was more complicated that it need have been, but on the plus side it made us all the more eager to shoot something when we did get going.
And so the next photo here is when we gathered for the start and I noticed the light in the face filtered by the light through the hat..
Some people had simple point and shoot cameras. One person had a big medium format camera that takes a 6x7cm film. A coupe of people had Leicas. The man in the first photo is shooting with a Leica. Chris twas shooting with an Olympus Pen F. The man here in the next photo is using a Pentax. You can see the AOC logo, which is The Asahi Optical Company that made cameras under the Pentax brand. That logo started life in 1919 and continued through to the 1950s. The camera is a Pentax Spotmatic with a Super Takumar 105mm lens.
You get the idea that for us camera nerds, cameras in all the variations are endlessly interesting.
The final image is not a person. It’s a half-submerged old inflatable in the river, tied up at the bank. I knew it was going to be an interesting shot because of the reflection of the yellow boat that is showing at the top of the photo.
I am going to try to go back and shoot the same shot with a digital camera to see how it looks.
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