Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire I still enjoy shooting with my old film cameras. Anyone else?

Thanks for the nice pics, um, images. And welcome to the forum.

My son in law came over the other day wanting to know if I'd sell him one of my 35MM cameras. I gave him a Canon AE1. Told him he'd have to find other lenses on his own. He said something about 35MM film was making some kind of a come back among the college crowd as his son was getting into it. He decided to try it for himself.

I still have two Canon A1s and an AT1 and about seven or eight lenses ranging from 35MM to 800 MM. I was into it quite a bit when I lived in San Francisco and had my own dark room. I always preferred working with black & white. When I did color it was slides and I farmed the precessing out. I still have a couple of Yashicamat copies of the Rolliflex cameras and liked the results I got working with them. I always wanted to build another dark room but problems with the water (alkali as hell) here and dust kind of put all that on the back burner. I guess that a lack of finances probably had something to do with it as well. Oh well.
PJ

I had a big film camera outfit. I had a Minolta 35mm, and 3 lenses and a motor drive. $1,200 worth. I had a darkroom in my house.

I was taking photos for my college annual, and for the college newspaper, and for the little town newspaper. I was developing about 3 rolls of film per week. Love black and white photography.

I have gone digital and now have a nice $700 Nikon digital. My old Minolta 35mm rig sits in a box, covered with dust, and is worth about Fifty bucks today.

Thanks for the kind words. And since I only have 0.27% of the posts that you do, I guess that does sort of make me the new kid on the block. Glad to be here!


My very first 35mm camera was a Minolta XE-7 that I bought in 1977 with every penny I had saved by working as a janitor at the church next to my house for $1.35 an hour. It took a long time to save the money & it hurt to pay for it. My mom was mad at me because I had "wasted" so much money on a luxury purchase. But I have nothing but fond memories of that camera. It was great even though my photos were awful.


I gave an AE-1 to my ex's stepson last week & he's already started texting me photos he's shot with it. He seems to be enthusiastic about "discovering" B&W photography so I'm glad he's enjoying himself. I really like my 1961 Rolleiflex f/3.5 TLR F model. It has a solid feel to it although shooting with it can be a bit unnatural if you haven't done it for a while. Here's a photo of me taking a break with my Rolleiflex in Chiang Rai, Thailand.

Nikon FM-2... mama, dont take my Kodachrome away...

Thanks for the thread and the impressive photos. For many years, particularly when our daughters were younger, we were traveling across the US a lot and I valued artistic diversion from career work, I involved myself as you are doing. The development/creation of film images was actually more fun than the on-camera composition/lighting/balancing, etc.

Other aspects of life gobbled up the time and, although larger format always had been a dream, I never got past the 35mm stage. So, there are quite a few excellent SLR + types still here - Nikon, Pentax, Leica, Mamiya Sekor, Canon, etc. and a slew of nice lenses throughout the range. A grand daughter is doing some very fine work with digital equipment but is yearning to do more with film - so she soon will take her pick of the above.

Thanks again for the educative and interesting thread.

Nikon FE-2...and Kodachrome had an ASA of 25. Please take it away! I'm not rich enough to buy fast lenses.

I did quite a bit of 2 1/4 square and 35mm photography back in the day, plus a good share of 4x5. Not to rain on anyone's nostalgia, but I like my APS-C DSLR a lot better. I can produce better work with it than I ever could with a Rollei.

From time to time, I organize photo expeditions for my grandkids that are interested. One of them is just about to graduate from high school, and she in particular has become quite proficient. It's a joy to watch all of them progress, and I've helped all of them with equipment.

I shoot with a Canon 90D DSLR, plus an M6 mk ii. I still have a Minolta 35 SLR, a Yashicamat 124, and a Norita 6x6 with assorted lenses. There are a lot of good memories attached to them, but they don't get used anymore.

I still have my old Minolta SRT-101 and a few lenses, but I haven't used it in decades.

That's because you're smart and using common sense. I think I get a bit too nostalgic sometimes & I'm willing to suffer for it. I really do like a nice B&W photo.

Having said that, my guess is that my digital photos outnumber my negatives by at least 1000:1 by now. Sharing photos instantly from a smart phone is a pretty cool modern invention that I get a lot of use out of.

I think that if I were to do film photography again, I think I would just process the negatives, and spring for a high resolution negative scanner... No enlarger, full digital image processing.

That's what I primarily do now even though I have some enlargers. If it's a really good negative scan, I think I'd rather start paying to have a nice Giclée print made out the few I want printed than to do darkroom work.

Awesome

Thanks kaywoodie! I like to surf around aimlessly and live vicariously through other people's photos & stories. It's kind of neat seeing what everyone else is doing in other parts of the country. I enjoyed the S. Texas get together thread you were in earlier today. Looks like y'all had a good time!

The F2AS is a wonderful camera and one of my favorites. The F3T is my very favorite. Still have the F, F2, F3, and F6. Had the F4 briefly. Never liked or owned the huge F5.

Besides Nikon, another 35mm camera I own and admire is the Minolta CLE, a tiny rangefinder camera which takes Leica M-mount lenses. I'll post a couple photos from this.




Edit to add that postimage.com blows.

Thank you! I enjoyed your photos too! I have a good friend, a fellow reenactor, who is a collodion artist. He does some awesome traditional ambrotypes. Using the original process.

Wow! That's impressive. I've never attempted to do any kind of wet plate work before. I think part of the problem is I have too many hobbies & projects already. But it would fun to watch someone else do it. Last year I used a 3D printer to build a camera so it's always fun to do stuff that's even further out on the fringes than film photography is starting to become. Making your own negatives using chemicals & glass plates then shooting it immediately in the field definitely qualifies as out of the ordinary these days.

I think it's a little bigger than the Minolta CLE but I lusted after a Nikon S3 for a while when they re-released a modern version back in 2000. Now they cost a mint:



When my kids were young, I used to have a Contax G2 that I absolutely loved. Now many years later I'm at a total loss as to why I ever sold it.

Now that was some camera! Compact, portable, and medium format, with a good lens. I always wanted one. Many years ago, I had one in my hand in a shop in Penang Malaysia, with a price tag of $125. I had the money, but decided against it, since it was a 620 film model. Probably not one of my better decisions.

My 523/2 is a 120 model that shoots 6x9cm negatives. This was my first camera & the one I’ll never part with. I sent it off to Oregon a few years back & had it restored. It’s a cool folding medium format with a lot of sentimental value because my dad brought it back from the war:



Here’s a snapshot I took of my friend Pat one day when we were cycling to microbreweries doing a pub crawl. It helps to have a camera that collapses flat & fits in a small backpack but still produces a big negative: