Astoria, OR 1992
From one of my many roadtrips with Trevor.
I was a fairly serious photographer back then: two Pentax ME Super SLRs, a silver (for print) and a black (slides):
Shared between the two, I used five different lenses, and mostly Kodak 25- or 50 ASA film for daylight, 200- or 400 ASA for night-time.
When I get to posting the game animal pics, you’ll see the results through various Pentax lenses — 500mm, 200mm, 40-80mm zoom (my favorite), the “standard” 50mm, and very occasionally wide-angle 28mm (although the latter I used mostly for landscape pics).
I don’t want to wander too far into the Camera Dork Forest… those days are far behind me.
Oh, boy! Another thing we have in common!
After my learning apprenticeship on my dad’s Argus C3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_C3
And building a B&W darkroom in our basement, I moved on to the Fujica ST701 in high school.
https://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Fujica_ST701
I ended up with a Nikon FG in college and used it until it died and the cost to repair it was less than a new digital SLR.
https://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Nikon_FG
I had resisted the switch to digital, but it was obvious film was all but dead (it has a niche following now, I guess, sort of like vinyl record fans), but I needn’t have been. The principles were all unchanged, and my film experience made the transition effortlessly with the camera, and digital editing was not far behind.
I now have a Canon 60D gathering dust these last ten years or so. Perhaps I should dig it out.
https://www.canon.com.hk/en/product/catalog/productItemDetails.do?prrfnbr=100075
Good luck finding film.
And if you manage to expose the film, where will you process it?
Last time I put a roll through my K1000, I had it developed at Walgreens. I was unpleasantly surprised to get back no negatives, but a CD-R with 3-megapixel (IIRC) scans.
If I shoot another roll at some point, I’d need to first find an alternative. Not getting negatives back is unacceptable.
/ the Camera Dork Forest /
Oh yes. Too often one is so concentrated on composition that later you can’t remember what was happening around you.
.
…not to mention shutter speed, aperture etc.
I used to have a Pentax like your silver one, only much older (I think it still said Honeywell Pentax on the body), with no autofeed motors or autofocus. It had been my dad’s, handed down to me with several lenses and an external flash unit when he got a Minolta with a bunch of automatic features. I shot several rolls through it, but eventually the film advance lever stopped advancing film and I had to stop using it (I started to suspect something was wrong when I got to shot #48 on a 36-shot roll); by that time it was too old to repair. I couldn’t even find the mercury coin cells needed to power the built-in light meter anymore, and converting to silver cells was going to be expensive.
I remember a couple decades ago seeing an article in Popular Science or similar about a company which was developing (ha!) a digital film “canister” for old manual 35mm film cameras. The device looked like a 35mm film roll with a rigid tab that covered the shutter area. Unfortunately, I never saw it hit the shelves; it would have been perfect for resurrecting that old Pentax.