Author: Steve

I was pleased to receive an email this morning complementing me on the coverage of Photography on my site and would I consider adding their website to the list.

When I looked at Photo Tips Galore  I was pleased to see it wasn’t full of tips for just smart phone users or Fujifilm X100 users! This site had everything including DSLR’s and film cameras as well as digital compact cameras. Take a look I hope you find something that interests you too.

Here are some other sites/channels that I enjoy looking at:

• Analog Insights – A German Channel that review and demonstrate film cameras;
• Dino Bytes – Revisiting early digital cameras and old gadgets;
• Electachrome – Film photography vlog;
• Gordon Laing – Reviews of modern up to date cameras;
• James Popsys – An English landscape photographer with a great sense of humour!
• Lucy Lumen’s Analogue Adventures – Australian film photography channel;
• One Month Two Cameras – Reviews of older digital cameras #nobadcameras;
• Photo Tips Galore – Ed Major, lots of hints and tips for all types of photography
• The Art of Photography – Ted Forbes, photographer based in Dallas Fort Worth.
• Willem Verbeeck – A West Coast American photographer who is very creative;

Take a look and see if there are any that interest you.

Firstly, I would like to give you my apologies for the recent lack of activity. The end of 2023 and beginning of this year took a turn in an unplanned direction and photography (and other things) had to take a back seat for a while. I’ve not even taken many photographs with my shiny new iPhone 15 Pro since getting it.

Hopefully though now that the weather is improving, I will start to feel inspired to take off the lens cap a bit more often and get outside with one of my many cameras.

I did film photography for several decades before changing over to digital photography about 20 years ago. At one point in the mid 1970’s I did a lot of black and white film photography and I had access to a dark room and all the equipment to process my own films and print my own negatives. I enjoyed the process. But I’ve not done any of that in the last 40 or more years.

In the last 20 years, my use of my film camera has sadly decreased to may be one or two rolls a year. However, I still enjoy using my Canon EOS30 film SLR camera, but it is quite a challenge compared to digital these days. There are times when I wish I still had some of my other film cameras such as the Olympus OM30 I used in the 1990’s.

The other major difference to digital photography is cost, the cost of film and of getting it processed etc. That has put me off doing it too often. It’s a sort of treat to do it once or twice a year.

After a bit of research I’ve found a company here in France that does film processing, scanning, printing etc. They are Nation Photo, they are based in Paris, but they do a mail order service. I did enquire locally about the cost of film processing, but it was a crazy expensive price. The Nation Photo site is available in English as well as French 😉🇫🇷

Nation Photo do quite a quick turn around. I posted a film to them last Tuesday, and I received an email back from them a week later with a link to download my images in TIFF format. They will post the negatives back to me sometime this week I guess.

For a change this time I decided to give Black and White film another go, it is many years since I shot in black and white apart from on my digital camera. I loaded up a roll of Ilford HP5, a film stock I’ve not used in ages. The grain is very evident in the resulting images but it adds to the creativeness of them I guess.

Once a month the local automotive club meet up in the town market square, naturally there are quite a lot of old French cars (2CV’s and the like), but there is also a good selection of other makes from around the world. I don’t go every month, but I was determined to ‘finish off my film’ last month.

Here are a small selection of my photographs from this recent film.

I’m reasonably pleased with the results. I have done some small adjustments to the images you see here, mainly to increase the contrast levels and some cropping.

I’ve been taking photographs for over 50 years, quite scary when you work it out!

I vaguely recall my first camera is one my parents gave me that they had got as a free gift or similar. It was very similar to the ‘Diana’ 120 cameras we still see today in different guises. I don’t remember using that camera a lot or what ever happened to it.

On a trip to London I was gifted a Kodak Instamatic 25 camera, this used 126 cartridge film. I remember using this camera a lot. I still have it, but sadly it isn’t easy to obtain 126 cartridge film these days.

When I was about 14 or 15 I got friendly with another pupil at school who was also keen on photography, he made me aware of a shop in Liverpool that sold second hand cameras.

With my saved up pocket money we took a trip over there and I bought a Praktica Nova 1B a single lens reflex camera. I also had to buy an exposure meter because the Nova 1B didn’t have a built in meter. I bought a bag and flash gun as well.

I used this camera for a number of years, I left school in 1975 and started work the Praktica came with me and I continued to use it.

I joined a photography group in Milton Keynes and I learnt how to develop my own black and white film, as well as printing my own photographs.

I sold the Nova 1B to a friend of mine when I was offered a Praktica LTL3 and some additional lenses. The LTL3 had a built in light meter and was a more modern design compared to the Nova1B. I used this camera a lot through the 1980’s.

In the late 1980’s now married and with a young family I decided to look for a new camera and found an Olympus OM30 for sale in the local newspaper. The OM30 had a focusing assist mode, it basically had a contrast detection system and it indicated which way to rotate the focus ring and when the lens was in focus. It worked with any brand or type of manual focus lens.

The OM30 was used throughout the 1990’s and I continued to enjoy taking photographs and exploring new places with my camera fitted with a zoom lens.

By the late 1990’s I was on the look out for a newer camera. Digital cameras had started to appear but they were still expensive and low resolution. After a lot of research and trying different cameras in a local shop I bought a Canon EOS30 SLR film camera.

A few years later I was made redundant from my job and I decided to buy a digital camera, the Canon EOS20D APS-C DSLR had then become recently announced so I bought one of those with a 17-85mm zoom lens (27-136mm 35mm equivalent. I used this extensively for the next ten years or more.

Travelling with the EOS20D and zoom lens could prove a bit of a problem on budget airlines because of the weight. For a grand seven week adventure to Canada and USA, I bought a Canon EOS100D (SL1) this was considerably smaller and lighter than the EOS20D.

The 100D has continued to be my main camera alongside using my iPhone in daily use.

In the summer of 2021 I inherited a Nikon D300, it proved to be quite a learning curve to learn a different system. But it sparked my interest in older cameras again.

I also started using again my wife’s long put aside Canon Powershot SX120is compact digital camera.

I started using this compact camera after seeing the new keen interest in older digi-cams on various You Tube channels: One Month Two CamerasOne Month Two Cameras, Lucy-Lumens Analogue Adventures, Snappiness.

I also laid claim to my son’s Canon EOS600D, this was a similar age to my own EOS100D but a better fit in the hand.

I am enjoying using these various cameras on a regular basis.

In 2024 I’m hoping to try my hand again at film photography and also do some black and white photography for the first time again in few years. Although I no longer my processing gear so I will be using a film processing company in Paris.