I decided to try out my old trusty film camera today out today and see if I liked the process. I think I have been hanging out to much in trendy places once again and want to shoot film again for some reason. I think it might be related to the rise of Ai Imaging or Dall-E and MidJourney as image making alternatives to photography. I know that good photographers are resourceful and will find ways to make images that stand out from the crowd. I suspect that one way that has been happening is the desire to revert to film and the process of analog photography or as I knew it just photography when I was beginning as a photographer. Film kept me poor for a long time I spent so much of my income on film. This fact is one reason why I embraced digital photography with such gusto. The other aspect for me is that digital photography is great for colour photography as I can control both tonality and contrast (an so much more) within image, where as for me black and white film I could do everything that I wanted to with it in a darkroom. I have recently been looking though my book collection and have realised that so many of the photographers that I admire work mostly with black and white and I for the past 20 years have worked mostly in colour. So I have been thinking about returning to making my images in black and white for the past few months I have been alternating between having my Leica M11 camera set up for black & white and colour. often favouring the black and white images that I have been making so I am thinking maybe I should also start to use my film camera again. So today I dusted off my Nikon FM2 swapped out the dead batteries and finished off the roll of film that I found at frame 30 in my camera. Loaded a Roll of TRi-X into it and I am going to take it out and see what I can make with it. I have no idea what is on the first three quarters of the role of Rollei film that was in the camera so I now have to find my processing tanks to process a roll of film. I used to find that quite therapeutic processing film is easy when you have done it lots which I have done.

I never really used this Nikon FM2 camera as when I used film, I had a silver one and that got stolen when I lived in Paris. I missed it so much that I actual brought this black chrome camera sometime after going digital, I have probably put two rolls of film through it. I consider myself lucky that I did buy it, as it is my only film camera that I have left. It cost £125.00 about 15 years ago, just after everyone went digital there was a lot of good quality film cameras going cheap. I mentioned recently about DSLRs (and their lens ) that same thing is happening with them, they going cheaply, this previously happened with film cameras. Now try buying one of these and they regularly sell for double or more than what I paid for it, if you can find a good one.

If I like using this camera and film combination again, I might just find myself looking at a new Leica (to me) film camera, as I have a great set of lens for one.