Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.—Aaron Siskind
Over time I have been increasing the amount of coverage of film photography, not just on my Film Friday posts on my photography how-to Blog but also on my fledgling YouTube channel, which also includes a few Cars & Coffee videos. Please check them out, especially the one about Datsun automobiles, when you have time.
Friday Flashback
When photo magazines were really a thing, they had travel budgets and could afford to send Contributing Writers, like me, to the big photokina trade show in Germany. At one of the last of photokina’s film-based shows I was sitting in the press room talking with Joe Meehan and other photo magazine editors when he asked, “How many cameras do you own?” Keep in mind that this was at the beginning of the digital era but many of us still used and owned film cameras, maybe lots of them.
A former Shutterbug editor told Joe that he had somewhere around two hundred cameras. I did some mental calculations and came up with 25, although that might have been a little low at the time. After digital imaging became mainstream, I sold a number of the film cameras that I owned, something that I regret to this day. Selling many of those film cameras was the dumbest idea in the history of dumb ideas. To this day, I really regret selling all of my Contax rangefinder cameras and SLRs. And while the prices I received for them were low at the time, the growing popularity of film photography has made them unaffordable for me to be able to purchase again. (sigh.)
How I made this shot: What better subject matter to test this high intensity color film than a car show featuring hot rods painted in Hot Wheels colors! Image was captured with a Pentax 6×7 and 75 f/4.5 SMC lens with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/11,
So what about you?
Are you thinking about going back to or starting to shoot film? My personal plans are to shoot more film in 2024, including capturing some of this year’s Cars and Coffee events with the film cameras that I have left including a Leica M6 TTL, Minolta Prod 20, Zeiss Ikon SW and maybe the now problematical Seagull TLR that Mary gave me as a birthday gift many years ago. Recently I have squired all of the six different Canon A-series film SLRs, including a Canon AE-1, AE-1 Program and an A-1 that I love. What are your film plans for next year? Click the Contact tab and let me know.
PS. In addition to film, I love divas, including Celine Dion and when I saw this black and white cover of her album The Essential Celine Dion with her holding a film-based Hasselblad. It just made me love her more.
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