vintage photography
A little less than one month. That’s how long this film had been sitting in my camera. And that’s how long it had been since my hike out at Loch Leven Lakes. I suppose that’s actually not that bad. After all, it took me over a year to finally upload the time lapse videos from my cross country road trip. And I guess it’s excusable since the whole shooting on film thing is a slow methodical process compared to shooting with a digital camera. Plus there’s the wait time of sending in the film through snail mail. I can’t remember the last time I sent something out via snail mail–how old fashioned and quaint.
Today I logged into snapfish.com and saw that the pictures I had sent were being developed. I downloaded a few of them to see how they looked.
I don’t know what it is about the pictures, but they have an old fashioned feeling to them, almost like the pictures you see when flipping through an old family album. I guess it kind of makes sense since the camera I was using is 35 years old.
Sometimes I like shooting with such an old camera because everything’s manual. It’s fun manually focusing through the split prism viewfinder on a moving object. The viewfinder is really large and bright, which makes it pretty easy to focus quickly.
The other cool thing about old cameras is that everything is mechanical. Photography is mainly a visual thing, but because the camera is mechanical it adds a bit of tactile and audible feedback. It’s cool feeling and hearing the lens click as you change the aperture and the camera makes a satisfying mechanical click when you press the shutter release. The camera makes a whirring noise when you set the lever for the self timer. Sometimes that has unintended consequences.
For this shot I set my camera on top of a rock and then set the self timer. Reese, the dog in the picture, apparently was mesmerized by the whirring noise the camera was making, so he ran over to take a look. We were all yelling for him to come back when the camera fired off.
Luckily I had one more try. There was one exposure left on my roll of film. So I set the self timer again. This time Mary was holding Reese so he couldn’t run towards the camera. But for some reason the camera fired off early, so it caught me before I made it into position. Dahhh group picture fail. But I guess it makes for a funny story.
