Film Camera a Month - January

I'm here with my film camera a month series for January where I used my Minolta, hi-matic f, rangefinder camera. I talked more in depth about the camera over here but all you guys really need to know is it's pretty much, a point and shoot camera with a cool focus system giving sharp photos with no distortion. It doesn't do close ups (bummer!) but I thought it might work well with a black and white roll of film and it did! 

I actually had another roll of film already in the camera, I'll show you the results below (spoiler alert - they turned out horrible!). There was a good reason that roll didn't turn out, which I'll explain in a second but first up, my roll of ilford HP5 - a black and white 400 ISO film. I shot the ilford HP5 at 200 ISO which is one of the only features you can change on the hi-matic. I've been pulling my film a lot but I think in this case lowering the ISO might just have accounted for the power difference of the alternative batteries (which again is explained all over here, so I'll stop yakking on about that!). 

I would definitely put another roll of b&w through the hi-matic and I would definitely drop the ISO again too :) So all in all a very successful first month where I achieved my goal of using more film - yay!

The last photo I took with Ben before he left for work *sad face*

Okay now to talk about some film fails. I have a really sweet local lab here and Mike the owner gave me a roll of "unpredictable film" so I already knew to have low expectations, what I didn't know was it's ISO was something crazy like 50/100 or 200 (Mike told me but I have a bad memory!). Anyway the bottom line is, I thought the 800 on the canister meant the ISO, so I rated my camera to 500 (slightly lower to make sure it was going to be well exposed) and took it in to have processed and that's where I found out I had gone WAYYYYYYYY off with my ISO rating - oops! Mike said he developed it longer but the roll still came out 95% blank. I did scan it anyway and there were a few photos where you can kind of make out some trees so I've posted them below.  Lesson learnt - make sure you know the ISO and always expect your film to come out blank so you'll never be sad :p

For Feb I'm going to be using my Canon EOS 3 which takes all my high end digital lenses. I'm excited this month to have the ability to take close up photos and share the results with you guys!