I shot my first roll of film, ever

[Al Kaplan]

It was nice to walk into about any neighborhood drugstore and find Verichrome Pan in a bunch of sizes, along with both 20 and 36 exposure rolls of 35mm Panatomic-X, Plus-X, and Tri-X. They'd also have Kodacolor, Ektachrome, and Kodachrome.

 

[crawdiddy]

Brownie Starlet, 127 film, 1961. Still have the camera.

 

[camera.bear]

In 1973, when I was 8, I started taking pictures with my mother's Kodak Instamatic and then I got a Polaroid Zip for Christmas a couple of years later. I still have the Zip but the pictures have gotten lost from moving around.

 

[Tuna]

Congratulations on discovering film. I hope your adventures will be fruitful.

 

[rolleistef]

2003, just after we got the Euro. I had got an Olympus IS200 fixed lens reflex. The glass was a superlative 28-110 zoom, but rather slow and the camera was really noisy overall. I then got my first proper camera, it was quite of a shock to switch to that full auto camera to a fully manual 1963 Rolleiflex...

 

[pinafore2]

About 1970 when i was 13, i brought my dad's Retina 1a loaded with Agfacolor CT18 and the Gossen Sixtomat on a school trip to Norway and shot 36 fine slides (38 actually), hooked ever since !

 

[Mudman]

sometime in the 90's with a couple of el cheapo cameras. I got my first "real" camera in 2002.

 

[FallisPhoto]

And I love it. I have owned digital point and shoot cameras exclusively up till now (not as old as some of the members here ). It is so much fun to do something complete different. Old analog gear is really facinating. I guess we all have different starting points and reasons getting into film (or staying). For me, its the facination of old analog stuff and being able to stand out from everyone else these days who shoot digital P/S.

For me it's the fact that film photography is old technology and it's what I grew up with. I know what to do with it better than I know what to do with a digital camera. I also think that if you load ultra-high resolution film into a good film camera, a digital camera that is in the same class can't begin to approach the quality yet. Maybe in ten years, but not yet. Of course I was saying the same thing ten years ago, and it still hasn't come true. Who knows?

I bought myself an Oly 35RC and Konica S3. I was really execited about getting the first roll developed. When I took the roll out of the camera (after spending a lot of hours shooting it), I was convinced that I had screwed up, because the shining/glossy part of the film (which I THOUGHT was the emulsion side, DOH ) was facing the pressure plate. But everything turned out just fine, and i've included some of the pictures to prove it , from the Oly.

Those are both really good classic cameras, among the best that their respective manufacturers ever made. You should enjoy using those, and if you get bad photos, well, you won't be able to blame the cameras.

How does old glass compare to modern compact cameras? Apart from features like autofocus and IS, is 30-40 year old glass as sharp as modern glass? I know it depends on a lot of things, but in general, how do modern and old compare with regards to image quality?

Between new and old glass of the same types, the old is just as good as the new; heck, sometimes it's better! The technology involved in making rangefinder lenses is very old and had improved about as much as it could be improved decades ago. In prime lenses, probably the last development of any real significance came back in the 70s, when Pentax discovered that you could bake coated lenses and the coating would become harder and fuse to the glass (this is what made multicoating possible). Since then it has all been zooms and automatic features. There have been some giant strides there though; up until the late 90s, all autofocusing zooms pretty much sucked ass. There are a few that are halfway decent now.

 

[shayallen]

I shot my first roll of film in March 09 when I got my M7...

 

[wotalegend]

My first camera was a Brownie Starflash which my parents gave me for Christmas in 1960. A few days later it had its first big "assignment" when I went to a Scout Jamboree in Sydney. Film used mostly was Verichrome Pan. Colour film was expensive and slow then. I still have that camera but it hasn't had a film through it for probably 40 years. The other night I pulled it out of my display cabinet for a fondle and noticed that on the bottom it has "Made in Australia by Kodak Australasia Pty Ltd". Ah, those were the days ;-)

 

[bo_lorentzen]

Shot my first rolls of film in the late sixties...

However, for my 8th birthday my father got me a 120 agfa box camera, this did not do too much for me, but when he took me in his dark room a week later to process the first film, I was hook on seeing the images come out on the print paper in the developer, never looked back from there.

Truthfully I suspect this was a desperate move on his side to keep me off his Rolleiflexes which i already had a eye for.

The box camera did not keep the attention long and soon became a folder rangefinder, and then a rolleicord... I sold my first image to the paper at age 16 and realized that the paper would be able to support my camera addiction, so I promptly prostituted myself to the picture desk in return for money and loaner lenses.

Nothing much changed over the years, the cameras grew bigger and more expensive, and finally getting back to the beginning with rangefinders..


Bo

 

[danz]

In the 80s, i am just a young punk who love to buy instant film camera and start shooting candid photos of people when they least expected. Those were the days...

 

[Turtle]

My first was 110 with a stick flash that smelt fantastic after it had burnt out each cell. I have not used one since the age of about seven, but I can still remember that smell perfectly. The photos are long since gone.