A fresh post for the New Year! One of my ongoing photography projects is developing old film that I have shot over the years and have left sitting around. At one point I was about to give up on it all thinking it would be too much work, effort, money and time… That all changed last year when I was getting back into film photography. I had this plan to shoot one roll a week. Pretty simple I thought until I tried to keep that up! Time was a big factor as I was working all the time and picking up the camera seemed to be a chore (not good at all). Also the cost of buying film and getting it processed was way more than I had bargained for!
Back on point here. I quickly realized that my one roll a week project may have been more than I could handle at the time. I decided that I would shoot when I had the time which made shooting 1000% more fun. I dug into that old box of film and discovered a mix of stuff that I had shot and a bunch of untouched rolls! Big bonus, I had some film to shoot that would be greatly expired and had some mystery rolls to develop during the times that I wasn’t shooting all that much.
All of that to say is that this post is about one of those untouched expired rolls. In the fall of 2020 I ordered this Gaf L-14 camera of eBay. I can’t remember exactly why I wanted it so much but I do know that it was pretty cheap and had a cool looking Petri 1:2.8/28 lens on it that caught my eye. I was a little dismayed when it did come. It was clunky, dirty and everything on it was loose and it felt like it might actually fall apart! Oh well, I figured it was an old camera I might as well put in old film so I loaded it up with a roll of expired Fujifilm Super 200. That was one of my go to films years ago and I had a few rolls still kicking around. I actually had to pry the back open with a screwdriver to get it open to load the film! As I said my expectations were not very high but I was open to give it a shot.
I took it out with me a few times in the fall walking my dog at one of the dog parks. I took some shots with it and quickly put it down when things at my work got real busy and forgot about shooting with it until this past fall. Once again I took it out and finished off the roll to be done with the shabby camera.
To my surprise when I got the roll back from developing the pictures actually turned out. The colours were dreamy and there was something really nice with the feel and vibe of the pictures.
I am pretty sure I am done with this camera but I have put the lens on a Zenit ET camera that I recently got and am excited to see how that works out!
Take care and happy shooting
Jeremy
Dusty Negatives 