Kevin - Senior Shoot Preview

I can't wait to work on some of the images from today's awesome photo shoot with Kevin and his family. Kevin is a pilot who is graduating this year, so we set up a special session with him this morning flying air to air. It was so much fun. Stay tuned, I'll post the rest of this project soon.

Loading Film from a Disposable to a SLR - Waiting at the Airport

While on my way back to Indy from Tennessee this weekend I really wanted to get some more of those cool cloud landscape pictures with my 35mm from out the airplane window on the flight back. There's just one problem... I have no access to anyplace that sells 35mm film! When I finally got to downtown Nashville the night before my flight it was already past 8 pm, which is when all the pharmacies were already closed downtown.

Of course, my chances of finding any 35mm film in an airport shop was about a million to one... nonetheless, I looked at all the airport shops in between my connecting flights on my way back the next morning. I finally found a tiny shop that sold disposable cameras. Two in fact.

Now, I wasn't interested in taking any photos with the disposable, but it did register in my mind that there is, of course, 35mm film inside that disposable. The question was, is it in a canister? If so, I should be able to simply break open the back and load it into my SLR, but if not, I would expose all the film when I would open it to check. I decided it was worth a try and documented the process with my cell phone camera.

Here you have your every day 800 film speed disposable camera:

Trying to pry the back open to get a look inside:

Drat. I just exposed the whole role:

It turns out that in a disposable camera, the film begins on a spool and every exposure you advance rolls it back into the roll. I should have realized before I broke the back open that because disposables have no mechanism to roll exposed film back into the roll, the film would have to start out of the roll, each advance drawing the next exposure into the roll:

Here I'm making sure I have it straight, when I spin the scroll to the right it does indeed feed back into the roll:

Last chance. There was only one disposable camera left after my first mishap. So, first things first, I advanced all 27 exposures with my finger covering the lens to keep the film inside unexposed:

Then opened the back again and tada! The roll is ready to load into any SLR:

 Which is exactly what I did when I loaded it into my Pentax K1000:

I was very pleased at the success of the project:

I'm excited to develop this roll and see how it turns out. If all is well, it shouldn't look any different from the others.

Photo Shoot Extravaganza - Results

The prints are in and so are the results of the our first Photo Shoot Extravaganza! Thanks again to all who participated. The prints turned out to be gorgeous. These are some of the images from the shoot:

And these are some previews of the prints. We hope you enjoy them!:

Do you like what you see? Would you be interesting in attending such an event in the future? If so, please email wm.smith.3@gmail.com with your thoughts. MJ and I would love to host another Photo Shoot Extravaganza in the near future, but feel we would need some feedback to see when would be the best time to schedule the next one. Thanks again for all your support! We hope to see you soon.

Filmonaut XIV

If you saw my last post, you'll remember that 5 of the several rolls I recently developed turned out to be double exposures (no, it was not on purpose). These are the rest of those double exposure images along with a few "normal" ones.

reunited old friends

This one actually turned out to be pretty cool... that section in the middle of the frame where the
blinds are in focus is the reflection from the screen on my digital camera. Because the blinds
are the same distance from the screen on the digital camera as Joy is from the film camera, they
were in focus too. Thus, the random looking blinds in the middle of an otherwise intelligible blur
that is the screen on my digital camera. XD 

Working on the house with MJ 

There's dad in the left quarter of the frame 

 These next two pictures are from Emily's first roll. Unfortunately, most of them didn't turn out because of

those double exposures, but these two did.

a panorama that turned out to be pretty fun

my buddy, Joshua, in a half way completed camera obscura 

Sometimes my work shows up in the strangest places! I like those little surprises. 

Easter with Grandma 

Donna, the crazy cardinal who flies into the living room window three times a day. I finally got a shot of her. 

MJ, waiting at Noble Coffee & Tea Company for the first participants of the 

Photo Shoot Extravaganza to show up. 

MJ at work