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.