Analog Photography 101! Or: How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Grain

[windit]

The film has globs of stuff that react to light, and keep what they saw a secret in the dark until they get dunked in acid. You can control the size of the hole, how long the door is open, and how fast the globs can remember the light they saw. The box itself does not need to cost you a month’s rent.

That's the greatest explanation of all time.

Hello I have stumbled across this thread late but am very glad I did. Thank you @pepper so much for this write up! You make it all so accessible!

I have been using a Kodak point-and-shoot (that used to be my nana's) pretty consistently for the last 6 or so years. She's just so reliable, and I now have a pretty decent sense of where her fixed focal length is, what light she can handle, etc.

But outside of that, I do everything digital, and have been kind of intimidated by fully-manual film cameras. BUT, because my friends know me as 'a camera person', I keep inheriting film cameras that I don't know how to use o_o .

As wisely stated by @stellarfieldanomaly , kit redundancy is no good, so I try to pass them forward so that they can live on with someone else. But I've just inherited another pile of cameras and these ones are different, so I think it's finally time to TRY AND SHOOT A FULLY MANUAL ROLL.

In this pile - an 8mm film camera (!) and a vintage pin-hole camera that shoots on god-knows-what film size.

The camera I want to try out is called the Lord SE, and it came with a full manual and letter from the seller who was in Japan. The two-generations-back man who bought this camera clearly did it on a trip, and so along with the fully Japanese manual, they gave him an English translation which looks like it was typed out by hand and then stapled together. So you have to use the Japanese diagrams with the English translation to get through. It's just all so wholesome that he kept all the paperwork together and his son inherited it and then he passed it on to the next generation and then it got handed to me.

I think I'll try it out with a B+W roll next weekend, and try out portraits of friends on a tripod. Fingers crossed.

I will attach some of the paperwork for fun x