Frugal Film Project 2024 - 35mm - March

February was almost a bust. I won't lie, I wasn't sure I was going to have anything to submit for the project when my OM101 failed and I had to get creative on the 29th February, which doesn't come around again for another four years. It was squeaky bum time and no mistake! Thankfully my dear chum Wellies had given me two OM101's and I managed to get a roll shot and developed in the nick of time.

March was a waiting game as we still had more dull and rainy days than sunny ones, but with the spring blooms appearing, there was hope of a sunny afternoon to go for a walk with my working OM101 loaded with Kentmere 400 35mm B&W film. I didn't quite get one. The moment I walked out the door the sun hid behind a cloud and stayed there.

I had a walk around the local nature trails and farm roads just to see if the substitute OM101 was good for more than one roll of film. I was also enjoying using my Goodman Zone with a roll of Ilford FP4 and, after grabbing a couple of shots of the camera literally in the field, I concentrated on other stuff with my OM101.

There's new growth appearing everywhere. There's a few Hawthorne's flowering whilst others are just starting to bud their new foliage. In the woodland the moss and the lichens are brighter too and the trees are starting to fill out the canopy. Spring is definitely here and I was beginning to wish I hadn't left my thermal liner in my jacket. I also wish it wasn't so blummen wet!

I crossed the fields via the public footpath and almost lost a boot. It's not easy pulling your good leg out of the mud whilst desperately trying not to fall over or drop cameras. However, I am stubborn and had committed to crossing the field, so I did. One thing I did not do was head up to the old spoil heaps as they are just too claggy for me.

One thing I did see for the first time in a very long time was the pond in the top field overflowing. The last couple of summers has seen it dry up completely and not quite manage to fill again over winter. It's so full there's a stream flowing over the top of the dam and down the hill. Winter 2023/24 was a very wet one here and I don't think we need to worry about the water table being too low this year.

As always when I am having fun, I soon ran out of film and battery power and had to head home, very tired but happy to have been able to get out and about and almost shoot a full roll in my OM101 before the batteries died. I swapped the rechargeable batteries for a fresh set and shot the last frame at home. One short of a full roll isn't so bad considering I have been doing a lot of fiddling about over the last couple of weeks making sure it would work after the other one died.

I developed my film the next day in HC110 1+47 dilution E for 9 minutes at 20 celcius and soon had it hanging to dry in my bathroom where I left it to dry overnight. I scanned it with my Nikon D700, Tamron Adaptall 2 90mm f/2.5 macro lens, Valoi 35mm film holder, Pixl-Latr and A5 sized LED light pad. I processed the RAW files with Affinity Photo 2.

Here's a few favourites from my wander in the countryside with my OM101 and Kentmere 400 for the Frugal Film Project.  All I was looking for was consistency this month after having to change cameras and I will try and head somewhere different in April. Both February and March have been very challenging and I need inspiration so a change of scenery is in order. As always I have placed them and more in my 35mm Frugal Film Project album on Flickr you can visit using the link below. I hope you enjoy them.

Frugal Film Project 2024 - 35mm 

Minolta Hi-matic 7 - A 1960's Masterpiece

Minolta are a long gone, but much loved camera manufacturer that made excellent 35mm SLR cameras. That heritage lived on with the Sony Alpha DSLR's, but a Minolta camera from 1963 caught my attention recently and I had to give it a try. Minolta were also a player in the rangefinder camera market. I recently came into posession of a Minolta Hi-Matic 7 rangefinder made in the 1960's and rather than it being a small compact camera, it's a beast!

Given the state of the technology back in the 1960's, electronics were big and most definitely not the small digital circuits of today. We are talking light sensors and metering circuits that all had to fit in a box small enough to hold in your hand, but not so big you couldn't carry the weight. It was a time when the space race was in full flow and Minolta, courtesy of the badge engineered Ansco Autoset version of the Minolta Hi-Matic, had been to orbit with John Glenn in 1962. The follow up to the Hi-Matic was the Minolta Hi-Matic 7 released in 1963 and it is a masterpiece of its day.

The camera market in the late 50's - early 60's was still divided between Rangefinder, Twin Lens Reflex, Graflex Press and the new kid on the block, the Single Lens Reflex camera that came to dominate the market. Minolta was a player with cameras in all sections of the market and this camera was their big play for the affordable rangefinder that you or I could produce professional standard photos with. It had a couple of things going for it that made that kind of quality available to us.

The original Hi-Matic had a selenium cell light meter that took advantage of the ability of selenium to create an electric voltage based on the amount of light it is exposed to. It was a big meter and covered a fair amount of real estate on the camera. For the Hi-Matic 7 Minolta switched to a smaller Cadmium Sulphide (Cds) based meter that needs a battery for it to work.

At the time the most widely available battery was a Mercury Oxide based battery and was before Joe Public knew just how toxic mercury is. Thankfully the electrical circuits inside the Hi-Matic 7 can work using a standard LR/SR 44 when placed in an adapter that you can pick up for pennies from the bay. The other alternative is the Wein Cell 625 that is the right size for the battery holder.

The Cds cell light meter doesn't suffer the degradation over time that selenium suffers from and allows the camera to have a fully automatic exposure system that is as good today as when the camera was new 60 years ago. You can also use the camera in full manual without a battery if you wish. The lens on the Minolta Hi-Matic 7 is a Rokkor 45mm f/1.8 and is a real gem. Combined with state of the art metering of the time, boy does it shine when you get your exposures right.

I can see why my mate Steve regretted selling his all those years ago. I really enjoyed using the camera, the shutter is so quiet I had to keep checking I had actually taken a photo. It wont fire again until you wind the film on. The Cds light meter is always on, but putting the lens cap on stops it drawing power from the battery, something to remember for future reference. The rangefinder patch is nice and bright, but don't worry if you get a dull one, they can be cleaned and brought back to spec by your favourite camera technician.

I shot a roll of Ilford HP5+ 400 at its box speed of 400 iso during a visit to Kirkby Lonsdale with my friend Keith and was really keen to see how it fared. We had a lot of fun in Kirkby Lonsdale and both shot three films with a part roll left in a camera to finish on another day. As I mentioned in a previous blog about our visit, it's not a big town, you can easily get round it in half an hour, but with several rolls of film to get through, we spent a few hours there and we will return at some point.

I developed my roll of Ilford HP5+ 400 a couple of days later in HC110 1+47 dilution E for 8 minutes at 20 celcius and soon had it hanging to dry. Digitising was done with my Nikon D700, Tamron Adaptall 2 90mm f/2.5 macro lens, Valoi 35mm film holder on my Pixl-latr and A5 size led light pad. I processed the RAW files with Affinity Photo 2.

Here's a few favourites from my first experience of using the Minolta Hi-Matic 7. This may be a big camera, weighing in at 1.5 pounds, but it was well worth the effort carrying it around for a couple of hours. I am very impressed with the photos I was able to produce with it and can definitely recommend it to anyone who has a penchant for big cameras with big performance to match. As always I have placed them and more in an album on Flickr you can visit using the link below. I hope you enjoy them.

Minolta Hi-Matic 7 - Ilford HP5+ 400

Frugal Film Project 2024 - February 35mm

 I was a very busy chap in January and February. I shot a few rolls of film on our one day of snow and it was gone in 3 days. I took my time to develop and edit my film and get them right because using aperture priority with my Minolta X-700 and Olympus OM-10 rendered snow as middle grey. It was easy to do with Affinity Photo 2, I wanted them to be right as one roll was for a project I am involved with and I will talk about that nearer the time.

It was almost the end of February when I finally got out for a wander with my February roll of Kentmere 400 loaded into my Olympus OM101 and 35-70mm power focus lens. Our dear chum, Keith came to stay for a few days and he took me to Kirkby Lonsdale where I would shoot my 35mm and 120 medium format Frugal Films for February.

"Use a more reliable camera" he said. "It won't fail like my folder last year" he said.....

Guess what camera worked perfectly this month?

Baldy The Baldax.

I was supposed to be shooting my 35mm roll of Kentmere 400 but sadly my camera had other ideas. It decided at the start of our walk that it was going to fail on me. I was puzzled as it had been fine and I thought the batteries had died so I bought some from a shop in Kirkby Lonsdale, fitted them into my camera and.... nothing, nada, nil points! I put it back in my bag feeling gutted, but on the bright side I would be keeping my two formats on separate subjects. A couple of days later, the 29th February 2024 to be precise, I took another look at my Olympus OM101 to see what I could do to remedy it.

After a bit of faffing about and swearing at it in three languages, I got it to work. However, there was a strange crackling sound and the Power Focus was only working intermittently. A little reading up on the fault revealed it's terminal and, due to the lack of parts for these things, it is now a brick. However, my dear chum "Wellies" had told me of this problem when he gave me not one, but two OM101's and I fetched the other from the shelf where it had been sat waiting pateintly for it's moment to shine.

The last time I touched this camera was on the day that Wellies delivered the kit to me. It worked back then and it had been sat on my camera shelf with no batteries in and a body cap fitted instead of a lens. I took my freshly charged rechargeable batteries, fitted them into the camera, mounted my 35-70 power focus lens and crossed all my fingers and toes. I switched the power on.

The camera roared into life and tried to load a film, a normal event for this camera as it powers up without a film already loaded and being used. I had managed to retrieve my roll of Kentmere 400 from the broken one, the auto film rewind worked long enough to allow me to use it again having taken precisely three shots. I retrieved the leader with my trusty film retriever, the best film gadget ever! I loaded it into my second OM101 and closed the back.

The camera quite happily loaded my film, automatically advancing it to number one on the frame counter. I set it to full manual and took four shots with the lens cap on, the extra one just to be sure and I set about documenting what I was up to that day. I was scanning a film that I shot with a camera I am reviewing in a future blog.

I took a few shots of that process and gave myself a chance of decent exposures by using my brightest light to illuminate the scene, a £10 led I got from Amazon a while back. It's not the best light in the world, but it is handy to have for what I was doing and I fitted it to the cheapest ass ho tripod I have that also cost £10 from Amazon. I got my toys out and took some photos of various cameras in my collection positioned on a coffee table and soon had my roll of film finished. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I developed my roll of Kentmere 400 later that evening in HC-110 1+47 dilution E for 9 minutes at 20 celcius and soon had it hanging to dry in my bathroom. From the look of the film I could see I had some decent exposures and I breathed another sigh of relief. My year of 35mm wasn't a bust. I digitised my film the next day with my Nikon D700, Tamron Adaptall 2 90mm f/2.5 macro, Valoi 35mm film holder on my Pixl-Latr and A5 sized led light pad. I processed my RAW files with Affinity Photo 2.

Here's some favourites from my February roll of Kentmere 400 shot with my spare OM101 Power Focus and 35-70mm lens. It was an absolute 'mare this month and I was almost ready to chuck it in and just concentrate on medium format for the rest of the year. I'm glad I persevered and I got a few decent photos out of it without leaving the comfort of my living room. As always I have placed them and more in my Frugal Film Project 2024 35mm album on Flickr you can visit using the link below. I hope you enjoy them. 

Frugal Film Project 2024 - 35mm February

Frugal Film Project 2024 - February 120 medium Format

I was leaving it late to shoot this months roll of Ilford HP5 with Baldy The Baldax, but it was worth it. Our friend Keith came to stay for a few days and he kindly took me to Kirkby Lonsdale for a photo walk around the town on the last Monday in February. It was good to get out and about somewhere different and we made the most of a dry afternoon in the historic market town on the edge of The Lake District, the Forest Of Bowland and the Yorkshire Dales national parks. We arrived at Kirkby Lonsdale at around lunch time and after getting Nedward, Keith's chariot, from the car we set about finding things to photograph.

Kirkby Lonsdale is an ancient market town with a market held regularly since before written records began. The buildings are mostly built of locally quarried stone and the local council are keen to ensure the character of the town is kept intact. Narrow streets and alleys abound and we were not short of things to photograph as we strolled around the town. I took a couple of light readings with my Gossen Trisix to help get my eye dialled into the conditions and it was a reassuring 1/125th of a second at f/8 - f/11 kind of day, depending where the clouds were. Nice.

Being on the edge of three national parks, Kirkby Lonsdale is a focal point for Ramblers as they explore the public footpaths and scenic vistas in the area. Most folk were happy to say hello and a few stopped and had a chat about our cameras. I was using Baldy The Baldax and a couple of cameras I bought for future blogs, a Minolta Hi-Matic 7 and an Agfa Isolette. Keith was using his recently purchased Kiev 4 rangefinder, Mamiya C2 and a Petri 35mm SLR. They were good talking points and folk were genuinely happy to see film photography still being enjoyed in the digital age.

We made our way to St Mary's Church in the heart of town and enjoyed a good wander around taking in the peacefull scenery of the churchyard. Spring is definitely here as there were plenty of Snowdrops, Crocus and Daffodils in bloom around the cemetery. I always find the first flowers of spring to be a magical sight as nature awakens from its winter slumber. Cemeteries may be a place for the dead to take the eternal sleep, but there's so much life at this time of year as early spring flowers bloom and the birds begin to build their nests in the trees and nesting boxes dotted around the churchyard.

The Church has been refurbished and rebuilt many times over the centuries, but it still retains some elements of its 12th century Norman architecture intermingled with 14th and 18th century repairs and additions. I'm not a religious person, but I do appreciate the skills of the craftsmen that built and maintained the Church over the years. It takes years to learn the skills to dress stone to a high standard and last many lifetimes longer than the original craftsmen who dressed the first stone blocks.

I had hoped to take a photo or two from Ruskin's View, a path above the River Lune that enamoured noted art critic John Ruskin and inspired JW Turner to paint it. Sadly nature has been taking its toll on the path as the steep slope down to the river has been seriously eroded by the flooding the area has endured over the last few years. A section of the slope has tumbled into the river and cracks are appearing on the path above which gave the local council no choice but to close it to the public. There is an ongoing effort to raise the money needed to stabilise the banking and save Ruskin's View for future generations. I hope it succeeds.

As is normal, Keith and I took a couple of cameras with us and we both shot a few rolls of film to document our afternoon walk around Kirkby Lonsdale. We had been so busy hunting compositions and trying each others cameras that it seemed like we had only been there for half an hour when it was time to head back to the car. Keith had paid for three hours parking time and we managed to load Nedward into the car and be on our way back to Wigan with a few minutes to spare.

I developed my roll of Ilford HP5+ 400 the next day using HC110 1+47 dilution E for 8 minutes at 20 celcius and soon had it hanging to dry. I digitised my film with my Nikon D700, Tamron Adaptall 2 90mm f/2.5 macro lens, Valoi medium format film holder on my Pixl-Latr and A5 led light source. I processed the RAW files with Affinity Photo 2.

We had an enjoyable afternoon of film photography in Kirkby Lonsdale. The weather was kind to us, the people were friendly, we shot half a dozen rolls of film between us and we didn't get a parking ticket. Result! I have placed a link below where you can find more info about the town and maybe help you plan a visit there yourself. Here's a few of my favourite photos from my February roll of Ilford HP5+ 400 for the Frugal Film Project 2024. As always I have placed them and more in my Frugal Film Project - 120 Medium Format album on Flickr you can visit using the link below. I hope you enjoy them.

Frugal Film Project 2024 - 120 Medium Format 
Kirkby Lonsdale - Things To See And Do