It's the summer holidays and, like a lot of grandparents, my wife and I are helping out by having our grandsons stay with us for a few days each week. This week our grandson Ethan wanted to go for a walk with me and learn how to take photos. The easy way would have been to hand him my DSLR set to full auto and tell him to get on with it, but we don't do things the easy way in my family. If we were going out with a camera or two, it was going to be a film camera.
I had a think about it as I knew he hadn't used one before, it had to be an easy option, but with just enough manual to make him work for his photos. My Pentax MV was the perfect choice and I fitted it with my Hoya HMC 28mm f/2.8 which has served me well in the past. With that choice made I began teaching him how to use the camera.
The Pentax MV is an easy camera to get on with, it is an aperture priority camera that automatically sets the shutter speed based upon the aperture the user chooses. All Ethan had to worry about was focus and aperture. The camera has a traffic light system in the viewfinder which he picked up on straight away. Green means it's ok, yellow means you have to play with the aperture ring. The Hoya 28mm has 6 f stops from f/2.8 to f/16 making it even easier for him. I loaded a roll of Ilford HP5 into the MV and we set off for a wander in the local countryside.
We had a chat about film photography and how it works and he seemed quite curious about it. He soon figured out how to focus and choose the right aperture back at the house and began to put it into practice when we reached the power lines across the wheat field. He chose a simple composition for his first ever film photo and began looking for other things to photograph.
This is where his curiosity took over and he began experimenting with dutch angles. I asked him why he was turning his camera to shoot diagonal photos and he said he thought it looked cool. Who am I to say no to that? As we walked we spoke about keeping our eyes open to the world around us and he was soon looking through gaps in hedges and at the odd bit of street furniture that stood beside the gravel roads. His eyes lit up when he saw the corn field!
He really got into his first try at film photography and by the time we had crossed the corn field and hopped over the stile to the pasture beyond it, he only had a couple of shots left. I still had half a roll in my Minolta X-700. Good thing I had my Fuji Instax Mini with me to keep us occupied as I finished my roll. We had a really good walk and it seemed like no time had passed when we arrived home a couple of hours later. I needed a rest and we both needed a drink before we developed our film later that afternoon.
I talked him through the process as I set everything up and mixed the developer, HC-110 dilution H 1+63 from concentrate, my go to developer. I loaded the film onto the reels and then began the developing process. He understands that film developing chemicals are to be handled with care and he graciously let me do most of it up to the rinse stage. I let him do that bit to keep him engaged in the process and his little brother enthusiastically helped to count the inversions. Then we took the film to the bathrom to dry. His roll was nicely exposed and I have to say he did really well for a first crack at film photography. I didn't tell him any rules or things to do or not to, he took to it naturally.
I scanned the film later that evening with my trusty ion Slides2PC 35mm scanner and liked what I saw before I removed any dust spots or scratches with Affinity Photo. Here are a few of Ethan's photos from his very first film and I'm happy to host them and more in an album on my Flickr account you can visit using the link below. All film photos used in this blog are copyright Ethan Power 2022 all rights reserved and used with his permission. I hope you enjoy them.
Ethan's First Roll Of Film
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