For starters: I wasn't sick for the whole month so it was easily better than February.
Film Photography
In February I picked up a film camera that Lucy inherited from her grandpa. I took some amazing pictures of the snowfall we got, my toddler sledding, I got really into it! I finished a roll, wound back the film, opened the camera and... it was empty! Doh! I didn't even think to check if it was loaded!
I recovered from this devastating self-prank, loaded the camera, and shot a roll.
The inherited camera was... kinda jank.
Don't get me wrong, it's an aesthetic... but I also only got like 3-4 useful pictures out of a roll of 37 which is a bad ratio.
Most of the picutres were not this cool dream vibe -- they were just blown our or totally blank.
As I got more into it, I acquired two cameras that worked more reliably:
- A cheap Ilford Reusable Disposable camera.
- Lucy got me a refurbished Olympus OM-1!
The "Reusable Disposable" sounds like an oxymoron but it's exactly what you'd expect:
- Basic plastic shell
- Static lens
- Static exposure settings
- Flash
- Rewind so you can load and unload your own film
I shot my first successful roll of Color film on the Illford and it was great!
The OM-1 is a really nice manual film camera and lens -- a "camera system". Lucy got it refurbished for ~$60 which feels like a steal given the build quality!
I love this camera.
I've also been developing the film at home which for me has been half the fun!
- For black and white film I do "Stand Development" where you dilute your developer 1:100 so the process takes ~1 hour but you can't over-develop.
- For color film development I'm just doing C41 development, which required me to buy a Sous Vide!
Yay kitchen sink science!
I have zero interest in film printing so I've recruited Lucy to digitize the photos by taking pictures with her DSLR (also an Olympus camera -- we're an Olympus family I guess) and inverting + editing them in Gimp. The results are great!
Here's some more pictures!
Note: I have a lot of photos of my toddler but I am avoiding publishing those too widely for his privacy. I also want them to be fresh when he inevitably uses them as dating profile fodder.
Besides photography I've started some stuff this month but nothing I can say was especially good yet, so I'll leave it there.
