A year ago - I was wanting a new challenge with what I do on a daily basis: taking photographs. Next thing I knew I had jumped into the world of film photography. Now a year on I thought I would share some thoughts about the experience.
I used to watch my dad burn through so much film growing up as he worked as a professional photographer. There were empty canisters scattered around the house everywhere you looked. I thought if my father can do it, it can’t be that hard, so I logged into Trademe in hope for a camera, watched a few videos on YouTube and thought - sweet, I can’t go to wrong with whatever I find as long as it works. I decided on buying a Olympus OM10 with a 50mm lens, which also included a manual adapter. Perfect, I thought, I had the capability to shoot in aperture priority (which takes out the guesswork of changing shutter speeds) and to also have the chance to shoot full manual if I was up to a further challenge. A few days later it arrived in the post and it was epic! Lots of dials and levers and all manual focusing. The OM series of camera are a beautiful piece of design from Olympus designer Yoshihisa Maitani. The size, the styling, and usability are just great for shooting in the street. The beauty of the design can be seen with a lot of the new digital cameras bringing back the original styling of these original film cameras. Next thing I needed to do was find some film to shoot with. Lucky enough, dad managed to scrounge up some expired Ilford XP2 400 in the garage which had expired about 10 years. I headed back to Google and YouTube to see if expired film was even worth trying out. Luckily it does with a few slight adjustments to compensate for.
So I grabbed the old boy and headed for a coffee to relive his glory days of shooting film with the ulterior motive of him showing me how to load it and whatever else I needed to know.
What follows are a selection from the 36 exposures that were developed.
Film was expired in Feb-2004 - shot in March 2017 at ISO 200 to compensate for expiry and c-41 processed then scanned digitally.
Film photography has started to reteach me to think about what I am composing within an image and I am becoming a lot more selective in pressing the shutter. Not having the option to shoot off a few frames then edit back on the computer has completely changed my perspective. Now with film I have to see a scene, then wind the film on, and then focus the image, all with a thought in the back of my mind that it might not even work! The use of the manual focus with the Zuiko lens is a welcome change from the auto focus of modern day DSLR and I was extremely happy with the results as it creates beautifully sharp images for technology from the 70s!
If anyone was keen to give it a crack I would strongly recommend it as I am absolutely hooked. I have even got my girlfriend hooked who had previously never taken a photo on anything other than her iPhone in her life.
I have just found an OM1 and a Canon AE-1 to test out as well as looking to medium format options!
Cheers, like and share or drop a comment about anything you'd like to know more about :)