Going Old School

Dug an old Nikon F film camera out of the closet with a Nikkor-S 50mm f/1.4 lens on it. The camera and lens are pristine. They were given to me by a customer at the photo lab I used to work at several years ago. The customer's father had the camera for many years and by the looks of it, didn't really shoot with it much. She decided that I was to be the new owner after his passing. She said that she could tell I enjoyed photography. I wasn't too sure about the exposure being accurate, being that it is a spring fired shutter and it's been sitting around in the darkness for so long. But, being curious, I decided to give it a go.

I then dug around in the fridge and the Ziploc bags inside larger Ziploc bags holding a variety of flavors of film. Inside a roll of Kodak Royal 25 swam to the surface of plastic containers and I figured that would be the best to be able to use the giant aperture out in the blazing Colorado sun. I figured I would set the camera to its fastest shutter setting of 1/1,000th of a second at f/1.4 and let it fly. There are a couple exposures at f/2 at 1/500th, but that only for a few frames.

I just wanted to play with that slim depth of field and the beauty that is film. Many of the images are far from my personal vision and style. I've decided that I need to explore more and not be so uptight about imagery. Everything shouldn't be perfect in every frame. It's downright gleeful that I can only shoot a single frame at a time and the lack of instant "gratification" on a computerized camera. The suspense of wanting to see that latent image is fantastic. That distinguishable racket made by the spring-driven shutter is musical. If you couldn't tell, I truly miss shooting film.

I went to reload the old iron horse and found another roll of the Royal 25. So I'm looking forward to using that relic more. I've got a ton of expired film chilling in the lettuce drawer. I might as well use it to fuel my visual dependency. If anything, I've learned in the last several weeks how dependent I am on creating visuals by controlling apertures and shutter speeds.

My name is Josh and I'm an addict.