A few days ago i saw the Analog (FILM) photog community on Hive. Decided to share my photography journey.
It all started in my 6-grade elementary school excursion. We had a Smena 8 camera in our house. For those that are not familiar with it, it was one of the first almost automatic, cheap, plastic cameras. You can set if it is cloudy, sunny, night, and are you taking a portrait, landscape... and the camera would choose f-stop and shutter speed from your settings. To take a photo you had to spring the shutter but you also had a wheel to manually rewind the film. Can you predict what happened next?
At the end of the day, i had at least 60 photos from that 36 shots film :D and maybe 6 were usable. As i was springing the shutter but not rewinding the film. Lots of double and triple exposures. That was the start of my art photography :D
Some time after that disaster i got some money and bought a Chinese no-name fully automatic camera. The setting options on it were Turn ON/OFF, Flash ON/OFF. That is it. The quality of it was surprising to everybody and i must say it survived a lot.
At that time i was mostly documenting all the crazy stuff we did. And browsing through the photos i have scanned, there is not a lot of them that i should share online :)
Thinking about it now, i think that period had a big influence on my photography. Because i still love capturing candid moments. There is some special energy in those photos where people are themselves, where they don't think about having their photo taken.
There were few years where it all started to shift to digital but it was too expensive. So few years i did nothing with my photography. Then my friend went on work and travel to USA and got me a Canon powershot 590a for maybe 100$. I liked that camera because it had manual settings option, and that was my entry to learning shutter speed, aperture and ISO and how all that works together.
Later i ventured into DSLR world with Canon 600d. Somewhere in that period, a friend of mine showed me his old film camera. It was Zenit 12xp with Helios 44m lens. It is a soviet film camera, build like a tank and it could be used as a self-defense as efficiently as for taking photos.
Helios 44m is a really interesting lens for modifications and can get you interesting results on digital cameras. If you want you can see some of those here Canon 5d Classic + Helios Craziness
It was not that easy to buy film, and it was not easy to buy it cheap. So i went with the first one i managed to find. Going with ISO 200 for what i photographed was not the best choice, but i did got some decent photos.
Here are some photos from our local photography gathering.
After that i got my hands on Zorki 4k. Zorki-4K is a 1970s Soviet-era 35mm film rangefinder camera and the rangefinder part got me interested. It was almost unused and i first thought it is broken because the curtain was moving really slow. But it just few rewinds and clicks and it was like new.
Most of this are black and white because of my poor choice of film. When you mix daylight film with yellow bulbs and bad light, colors are not that great.
At the moment i have a film inside Zorki for almost 3 years. I forgot to set the shutter count to 0 so i don't even know how many shots i have left in there. Maybe discovering this community will push me into developing that.
Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode (tutorial, Part 1)
Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode, Shutter speed (tutorial, Part 2)
Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode, Aperture and ISO (tutorial, Part 3)
Photography Basics: Learn Manual Mode - Thinking process (Tutorial Part 4)
