I have a film camera. You may already know this – I did Russia on Film a couple of years ago and I’m genuinely surprised I didn’t do Rome on Film, since I took photos there. Long story short, I found three ancient rolls of film, bought a camera on eBay and snapped away. Actually, I didn’t snap that much. I have my digital camera hanging from my wrist all the time and I can’t add a film camera as well, so it tends to live in my bag and I tend to forget it’s there. I’ll take 800-1200 photos in five or so days on a digital camera but it’s rare I manage 24 on film. But this time I did.
I bought a new camera for this trip. I intended to take lovely pictures of Iceland in winter and the camera misbehaved, by which I mean that I couldn’t get it to work at all. I bought it new batteries, I spent hours feeding the film in and coaxing it to move on, coaxing the shutter button to do anything at all and eventually concluded that a $3 eBay camera that started its life in the 90s had just had enough. Its replacement – a princely £23 – came from Amazon and was brand new and considerably different. It’s very light and feels very plasticky, a toy camera rather than a real one. You have to manually wind the film on after every photo and manually rewind it at the end and it has no lens cover, only the option to have the flash on or off, which I love because I never ever use the flash and built a little cover out of electrical tape to put on my last camera.
And it turns out it takes pretty good photos!
