Darren Sharp's Blog - life thru a lens

So here I am, having received my black and white film back from the developers.  Reading the envelope, marked “Photographs - please do not bend” bought back so many memories…..some good, some not so good, depending on how you were at the time of shooting the roll of film.

You can image my trepidation as I gingerly prised open the envelope.  I was thinking about if any of the pictures had come out, did I load the film correctly, what about my metering (as I didn’t have one and was using the general F16 sunny rule)…

While shooting the film, the hardest thing (which we have more than taken for granted with digital cameras), is how we compose and set the camera, as with digital we can just throw away the images we don’t like.

I knew that I had 24 images and had to make the most of what I wanted to achieve, so no second changes and film is quite unforgiving with the ‘lazy’ photographer, which we all have become to a certain extent.

In taking the images, I had to rely on the f16 sunny rule for setting aperture at f16 and shutter at 1/100th sec, so ISO at 100 (even though film was FP4 @ 125 ISO).  Even I had to look this up to double check tut tut.

So without a camera’s light meter (studio light meter in my pocket as a back up), no manual or auto focus.  This was achieved by guessing short distances, or using a rangefinder (a first for me) to merge two images through the window and read off the distance in feet.  Then after converting into metres, choosing this on the front of the lens to focus.

Well, I can say that I am now the proud owner, once again, of a roll of black and white film and am happy to report that ALL 24 exposures came out.  19 are pin sharp and I am so proud of the little Retina 1A from Kodak (made sometime after 1949) that is still working to its best, 60 years later….if only we could say that modern cameras today would last like this (the lens probably would).

This entire project was a bit of fun and leave with me a little collector’s piece.  But, I wanted to prove to myself that I had learnt some basics in photography after completing my course at The Photography Institute and secondly that old film photography is still up there with the best of digital photography.

If you’re interested in seeing the gallery of images, please use this link:

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