When I first started taking pictures, 35mm and 120mm film (and Polaroid) was all you could use. When I moved to New York, I took some photography classes at ICP to learn how to shoot and then develop my own black-and-white film.
Then in the aughts, I made the switch to digital with a Nikon D50, an Olympus C7070, a Canon PowerShot A80 the last two being two point-and-shoots that I absolutely loved and that I allowed me to take some really good pictures:
As I understand, old 4 and 7 megapixel point-and-shoots are back en vogue as “digicams”.
But, earlier this year, for me, it was in the opposite direction I went. I got a used Leica M6, the legendary rangefinder with its clever bottom film loader (truly ingenious, I should write a post about it).
Also, as “going back to the basics,” I ordered the Ilford Starter Kit and the Cinestill Monobath, another ingenious tool that allows you to develop black-and-white film in a single step with a reusable chemical solution. The first attempt failed when the roll got exposed with a (fake safe) red light, subsequent attempts were more successful.
But after 3 minutes of shaking the container at 80 degrees F, the first roll of Ilford HP5 came out quite well:
The tricky part wasn’t so much the development, but the scanning, more on that in a future post...