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!

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Rangefinder Camera - Minolta hi-matic F

I'm finally getting around to adding more cameras to my film camera guide - today's addition, is a camera I've had for a while but shamefully have only put one roll of film through it. It's a relatively cheap film camera, you can pick up for under $50 off eBay and I got mine whilst thrifting.

The hi-matic f, is a range finder camera which peaked my interest since I've never owned one before. Your typical SLR (single lens reflex) cameras have a mirror (reflex mirror), so when you look through the viewfinder the mirror shows you what the lens sees, with a rangefinder camera it's mirror-less so the viewfinder doesn't give you an accurate view of your shot which is something you have to take into consideration when shooting. On the plus side without a mirror it's really compact and inconspicuous and from reading this article makes for a good street photography camera!

Another thing with rangefinder cameras is to get an image in focus you look through the view finder and you'll see a ghost image in front of your image.  You then need to match up both images by turning the focus ring on the lens. Since this was my first range finder, I found it more novel than awesome but I definitely want to revisit this camera again.  

The batteries meant for this camera are no longer in production (or at least I couldn't find them) so I bought a pack of AG13 (LR44) button cell batteries, placed two batteries on top of each other, wrapped a thin strip of paper around the two (to stop them falling apart) and popped them into the battery compartment which did the trick :)  The comment thread of this article suggests that this battery trick will give more voltage and thus causing the exposure meter to read wrong and underexpose. The film I got back did seem to err on the underexposed side so possibly due to the battery voltage.  Unfortunately, because this camera is auto, the only way to really play with exposure is to rate the film speed lower.  You do this by turning a black wheel on the front element of the lens.  The film I used was 100 speed and I set the camera to 50 but next time I'd use a much higher speed film and go a few stops lower :)

The camera comes with a fixed 38mm Rokkor lens 2.7f/stop so wide but not super wide!

I also think the camera looks really nice, that counts for something right?

I put through a roll of lomography 100 Colour for my test roll, I wouldn't say I got stand out results and probably why I never came back to it but I'm definitely keen to put through a black and white roll next time, I think that's where its magic could lie!

Blue light leak? Not too sure what caused this guy

Rangefinders are meant to be sharp with no edge distortion or vignetting (black edges) which I think these photos do a good job of showing

Have you guys had experience with rangefinders, yay or nay - any tips?

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