Today’s Post by Joe Farace
I preparation for my review of Ilford’s HP5 PLUS 35mm film, I planned to shoot it at, what else, a car show. Mary belongs to a Facebook Cars & Coffee group and she told me about an upcoming event that was sponsored by a local marque club, one we formerly belonged to when I owned on of those kinds of cars. Tangent: I haven’t been on Facebook for a long, long time and, in fact, am currently involved in only one social media—Instagram, keeping me still firmly under Zuck’s thumb. Please follow me there (@joefarace) for a look and insights behind and sometimes beyond this blog.
One of my goals for 2023 is to streamline my scattered use of film cameras and I’ve decided to focus all my film photography efforts around my Canon A-series cameras and plan to sell some of my other film cameras —not my Leica M6 or Zeiss Ikon. I’ve already started the process by selling my Yashica FX3 Super in December. Anyway, as I was saying…
I planned to photograph this Cars & Coffee event using Ilford HP5 Plus in my Canon AE-1 with a 50mm f/1.8 lens. (My only other FD lens is a 50mm f/3.5 macro.) When I first met Mary in 1981, she was a big fan of Ilford HP5 which she shot in her Canon FTb before she later switched to Nikon (the first time.)
One of my quirks when photographing car shows with film is not to load the camera until I get to the site and look around to see how many and what kinds of cars are there. Before we left for this single marque show, I looked out the window and saw a deep overcast sky, what I call “muddy” light, and thought that a combination of black and white film and ugly light equaled ugly photos. Mary agreed and she decided not to bring her Nikon Z fc either. But we thought, “what the heck, we’ll just go look at the cars.” Except… There were no cars* at Cars & Coffee. There was people and coffee too, though. So we were both glad we left our cameras at home. My review of Ilford’s HP5 PLUS will have to wait until either the weather gets better—big snowstorm on Wednesday—or to shoot indoors. Based on Wednesday’s post, that got me thinking…
Since there no cars at the show, I decided to feature an image from a real Cars & Coffee event that I shot on film. The below photograph was made with FujiFilm Acros 100, which has been my favorite black and white emulsion since returning to film photography in November 2021. Who knows maybe I’ll like Ilford HP5 PLUS better but I’ll never find out until I get chance to use it, hopefully sooner than later.
How I Made this Shot: I photographed this Toyota Supra with a Minolta Prod 20, which is basically an autofocus 35mm point-and-shoot camera that Minolta produced in 1990 as an answer to Olympus’s O-Product that was launched in 1988. The O-Product is a camera I’ve always wanted to own but these days even rough copies are expensive. The Prod 20 was gift from Mary that she purchased from one of her friends at Minolta back in the days when they still made cameras. The well-expired FujiFilm Acros 100 that I used here was shot at box speed. You can read more about that day’s shoot here.
*PostScript. It turns out we were not the only people who went to a car show that wasn’t. Mary just told me that someone posted on that selfsame Cars & Coffee group that they drove to a car show in Colorado Springs that was listed on Facebook only to find out there was no show. The moderator replied that they don’t check listings and the people who post show notices are responsible for them, not him or Facebook. So as the late Michael Conrad used to say on Hill Street Blues, “Let’s be careful out there.”
If you would like to send me a roll of film to review or any other stuff that could be used for these posts and my videos you can mail it to: Joe Farace, PO BOX 2081, PARKER, CO 80134