As you might have gathered, I’ve recently gotten into film some…
This all arose, really, from an idea I had for the blog. You see, my highest-drawing post remains the one on that excruciatingly mediocre lens—the one I dropped into the donation box at the Goodwill without a second thought—and, like any other blogger, I’d like to draw more traffic to the site.
So I had a thought to review old, cheap lenses and cameras, stuff with little or no presence on the web otherwise. However, it seems others have had similar ideas: every lens, camera or bit of gear I checked on had at least a couple of pages of reviews on google, if not many, many more.
For example, that JC Penny 135mm f/2.8 I shot with a couple of times during the 365 project. Guess how many reviews/mentions of that there are out there?
Surprisingly many, it turns out.*
Anyway, almost simultaneously, I realized this whole idea was really about gear lust: I wanted an excuse to buy the D750… See, with a full frame camera, I could review cheap, old, unpopular lenses on full frame and crop sensor: some might be suitable for one but not the other…
Long story short (too late, I know), I decided to buy a film camera. Depending on your use case, film beats digital, and even seems to be making some sort of resurgence. An older, manual (or mostly so) film camera would force me to learn more about the technical side of exposure. And, anyway, film cameras are just cool.**
The only worry was the expense and availability of quality developing and scanning services, especially since many mail order labs no longer return negatives, but (as I discovered) developing film at home is relatively easy and relatively cheap too.***
In the interest of dragging this out some, keeping you in suspense, I’ll leave off here and follow up in a couple of days with more on my flipping great new acquisition.
*Interestingly, one of my posts shows is the second result, and that’s on DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t track searches, and shouldn’t recognize that it’s me searching and so return results by/about/related to me as Google does.
**And so am I.
***I recently developed rolls 9 and 10 with the first batch of chemicals, bringing the chemical cost to $2.45/roll, and the quality is still great, and I expect to get another 4-6 rolls from this batch, at least. Sure, there was an additional start up cost, but once the beakers and jars and tanks and all are acquired, the seem to last quite awhile.
