Film

Not so long ago I ran across my old 35mm SLR camera…

Many of the images you have seen on Friday Flashback were taken with this camera.

The places it has been….the sights it has seen and photographed…the memories that come flooding back when I hold this camera in my hands are many. I held it one day, my fingers turning the dial, looking through the viewfinder as I focused…I remembered you had to push the button on the bottom to release your film…then winding until you heard the film release from the slot you had so lovingly tucked it in to not that long ago.  Pull up on the little hand crank to pop the back open and dump the film canister out into your hand.  Anticipation as you waited for the film to be developed and soon you were holding the memories in your hands.  Your visions come to life in the shape of photographs.

There was no question, I decided I wanted to shoot with the camera again.  My first order of business ~ find the small, round, silver batteries to bring her back to life…success.  Next I had to find film…it wasn’t that difficult but there is considerably less film in the drug stores than there was once upon a time.  Slide the film into the slot, line up the little blocks on the  negatives with the roller guides, snap the back closed and tighten up the film ~ just a bit, not too much…and I was ready to go.

I selected four images from the 24 I took ~ I wasn’t going to suffer you through all of them.   I asked the lab to put these on disk to make sharing them a little easier.  These are straight out of camera…I reduced the size for posting.  No color enhancements, no additional vignette added, no sharpening…nothing except size reduction.  These were taken with a 50mm 1.4 ~ and I will admit I have been spoiled by auto focus.  It was quite a challenge to focus this old cameras with these much older eyes.  🙂  These were taken while I was on vacation in South Carolina last month…I was pretty pleased with my first time out in many, many years…..

Notice the vignette in this one…lovely….

And the bokeh in the background on both of these is quite nice…

There is something about the natural grain on film….I’m already looking forward to my next roll.  🙂