Hasselblad owners please look away now. The following content may be disturbing.
Steps to quality photography:
1) Be given a 40 exposure APS film – a type I’d never seen before – by my neighbours.
2) Head to eBay for a 2nd hand camera.
3) Make the local Lofi group look a bit perplexed about suitable film dev reels. They need to be smaller reels as the film is narrower than 35mm.
4) Talk to a mate about the horrors of scanning APS film. It lives in its tiny reel post exposure so is as curly as you like.
5) Send the lot off to Photo Express in Hull to be developed.
6) Experience the joy of receiving photos through the post like the olden days. Okay, they were on a CD, but you know…
Ah yes – there’s the middle bit – the taking photos. For this level of technical photographic excellence I needed a Beer Festival in the Polish Club on the terribly inappropriately named True Lovers Walk in Loughborough and some really old drinking buddies. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I’ve spent more than a few hours with this lot sober in the 20+ years I’ve known them. Ahem. As beer was clearly the priority here, the camera was put on the table, like a disposable camera at a wedding, and we did our worst…
I felt a bit bad about ambushing this poor man, but hey – he’s behind the bar at a beer festival. It can’t be the worst thing that’s happened to him.
I did try and take some outside but I think my judgement was a bit off…the “Rubber Queen” bike wheel is less amusing when sober, and True Lover’s Lane is a bit horrid.
I’m particularly proud of the finger slightly over the lens.
We valiantly tried to bez through the 40 exposures but there were three left at the end. There’s a setting on the camera to take C, H and P (panoramic?) printand the manual says that this can be changed mid rolls. As you can see, the results are stunningly diverse.
Right, next time I’ll use a camera that’s a bit more proper. Promise!
This blog was first published on 52rolls.net