Well, maybe not really worth celebrating, but I’m still here!
Last post here from 2015 – it was a year when I became a father and then few other things happened and priorities shifted so no time, motivation or <pick any excuse here> to post things online. So if I’m about to resurrect this again, a little background on what has been going on.
One of the things in recent years is that I’ve resurrected an old hobby of mine. With a little nudge from a work colleague a couple of years ago, I got back into film photography. Luckily, I hadn’t sold my precious Canon FD camera system during the digital SLR era and managed to acquire a modern-era Minolta SLR for a very decent price.
And it didn’t stop there—I acquired a couple of nice old medium format (120 film) cameras from local flea markets and also got a Soviet-made TLR that was used by my grandfather. These are my favorites; with their very limited exposure control options, you just have to focus on the scene when shooting.
I still had a rather decent flatbed scanner to work with negatives—I used to scan color slides with it back in the day—but soon became overwhelmed by the time consumed in scanning at high resolution. Then there’s the digital post-processing to be done, and that seemed to take away the whole point of using film. So, when a spare room happened to be available in the basement, I turned it into my darkroom. I managed to find a sweet deal on a 4×5″ film enlarger that had been used at a local photography store in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s a very basic machine—it didn’t even have a timer when I got it—so I’ve been making prints on single-grade paper with a very manual process.
To sort out what to print, I’ve tried various options for film scanning and found that using a mobile phone with a suitable application has been the best choice. I can scan a roll of film in a few minutes. The resolution isn’t mind-blowing, but it’s good enough to preview the frames before printing—and they’re decent enough to share on social media if needed.
I tried using Instagram for publishing photos, but the whole service is so mobile-phone oriented that there seems to be little to no point in publishing anything other than mobile shots there. So maybe here?
