My First Attempt at Film Photography

About a week before going back to school, we received a package in the mail: my grandpa had sent us his old Olympus OM-2 SLR film camera (he had asked my dad over the phone if we wanted it, and he said yes; I was obviously happy to hear this, as I had been out of town at the time of this phone call and had no idea of my grandpa's offer). It was exciting to uncover the anachronistic beauty, but challenging to figure out how to replace the battery, load the film, and decipher the control mechanisms. Luckily, with the help of some online tutorials - and an OM-2 instruction manual webpage - we got the machine set up and ready to shoot; my grandpa had even sent along some film that I could get started with.

Excited by a new photography endeavor, I spent the last week of summer hunting down good photo subjects and pretty much anything that caught my eye. I filled up four rolls of film (would you believe we'd had some in the cheese drawer of our fridge for years without me even realizing that that's what those little canisters were holding?) in that short amount of time and left them at home, not anticipating there'd be anywhere near school to get them developed since Middlebury's such a small town and even big-name chains had apparently shut down film development business. However, I came upon a website, The Darkroom, that advertised mail-in film development. The prices were pretty high, so I decided to only send in one roll just to see what their service was like - and, more importantly, how my photos came out.

Well, today they emailed me and told me they'd uploaded the scans of my pictures, so I logged in to my account to check them out.

Probably the single most important thing that I learned, just from looking through the scans, is that film photography is a skill perfected over time with lots of practice. And since this is the first roll I shot (ever), it's pretty rough, but on the whole not awful for someone who's never used film before. (Though these pictures can certainly give me some pointers as to how I can improve going forward.)

*I am including every exposure, in order, so you can see the differences over time.

 These first few are me getting used to the machinery, essentially.

This was my first night working with the camera, and I'm pretty sure that the next few shots were exposed to the light, causing the weird marks and washing out of details.

Aside from a bit of shaky-cam on the third one, these came out pretty good.

This one is the most crisp of all the shots, which honestly amazes me when I compare it to all the other ones on the roll.

This one is okay, except the focus is to the far-right instead of the center, where I had intended it to be.

Another one that's good but for a focusing issue.

I like the very vintage feel of this one; sure it's a little blurry, a little washed-out, but that gives it a very cool, old look.

This one has an interesting bleed of pink on the edges - again, a cool, vintage look. (Very toy camera, this one.)

I'm not sure what happened with these next few: it seems I may not have advanced the film enough before taking the next shot, which is why there's a partial overlap of frames.

Though there's still the overlap, I think, with these two, it's rather cool because the overlap is a mirror shot, which has an amazing effect.

I have no complaints about this one; it came out great.

Again, focusing issues/shaky cam, but not hugely detrimental to the quality (considering this is my first go at it, of course).

This one's fine as well:

Just wanted to share my experimental photographic pursuits, since this is primarily a photo blog after all, and I love me some pictures. Whenever I end up getting other rolls developed and scanned, I will absolutely pass them on to you all.

Have a great weekend, everyone!