getting started with film photography

I found an old film camera and I have been playing around with it over the last week or so. I didn’t know what I was doing (and still don’t) and so I had pretty low expectations on how they would turn out. I’ll be honest: I was a bit disappointed at first with the results. I know I said my expectations were low but I had hopes that I would turn out to be an amazing photographer.

I thought I’d share with you the bad ones and then the not so bad ones.

Some of them were blurry:

Something that I probably should be mindful adjusting the focus (there are a few basic distances to set it to around the ring of the lens) depending on how far away the camera is from what I’m shooting.

Some of them were underexposed:

Some were overexposed:

Even though I do kind of like the look of overexposed pictures; I wouldn’t mind seeing if I can get them to have truer colouring. I might need to play around with the aperture (the aperture is the hole in the lens that opens and closes to let more light into the camera to expose the film (thanks google)) settings. I did learn that you can set the aperture depending on the weather – e.g. if its super sunny and there aren’t any clouds, you would set the aperture to f/16. F-stops are the aperture measurement – the bigger the number, the narrower the hole which means less light is exposed in the film. The smaller the number, the bigger the hole which means more light is exposed. My camera has f-stops ranging from 2.8 to 22.

After a bit of googling I have discovered that the overexposure can happen when the selenium light meter (the thing that decides the exposure settings) starts to go bad (uhoh). Let’s hope that it’s not that.

Here are some ones that I don’t mind:

Okay so the photos aren’t perfect and there are things I want to play around with more. I might not be some amazing photographer but I’m still learning. I’m having fun so I’m going to keep learning and shooting.

clara x 2020