It has been over 20 years since I shot film, and I have a few vintage cameras lying around, so why not put them to good use.  A few years ago I shot two rolls of 35mm Fuji Superia film, but there was nobody on the island that I would use to process the rolls, so they sat in my basement for over two years.  A few months ago I found a place in Charlottetown that processes film.  The downside is they do it by hand, and there is a long wait, just over two months in my case.

I used an Olympus OM-2 and a Pentax ME Super for this experiment.  I was pleasantly surprised the light meters and shutter speeds on these old cameras worked perfectly.  The OM-2 is over 50 years old, and the ME Super is over 40 years old.  The OM-2 is mainly a mechanical camera, whereas the ME Super is electronically controlled.  I prefer the OM-2 over the ME Super mainly because I like how it looks and feels.

Rather than pay extra for the local lab to scan the negatives, I decided to do it myself.  I have a flatbed scanner that can scan various film formats. I scanned the negatives, and the results were less than satisfactory; to be fair, it is a budget scanner.  The local lab scans film with a digital camera, which produces much better results.  So, I decided that was the better way and ordered a film digitizing adapter from Amazon for less than $100 CAD.

With the two rolls scanned into the camera, I downloaded the files and tried processing them.  This entails converting a negative to a positive image, which I did in Lightroom and Photoshop with less than stellar results.  Neither of these photo editors has a simple solution for this purpose.   There is somewhat expensive  software available for this purpose, but I’m cheap and wanted to find a budget solution.  I found a free tool called “Film Scan Converter” that runs on Linux.  It does a good job with just a few mouse clicks to create a positive image.  Once those images were created, I imported them into Lightroom for some final tweaks.  As the film was sitting around for about 5 years, there was fading, and the local lab did not do a great job of processing the film, as there was chemical residue suggesting uneven development and/or rinsing.  Unfortunately, several frames of film were ruined.

Nothing is really analog in photography anymore.  These days, shooting film and having a lab process them means that your prints are based on digitized negatives.  If one truly wants a fully analog process, then one must have a darkroom with an enlarger.  I got rid of my darkroom nearly 30 years ago.

I still have a few rolls of fresh film, so I’ll try old-school photography again.  There is a new lab in town with much faster turn around times, and that’s encouraging.

The following images were taken in North Rustico and Souris.