New photography series

 A new series of posts for my photography

Since 2021, I've been leaning into photography as a hobby. Starting with my father's Olympus OM-2 35mm film camera and a reusable plastic film camera, I have set out to capture scenes I find beautiful in New York and abroad. This post is an introduction to a new series I'm planning to showcase my best photos, explaining my cameras, film stocks, and developers.

Camera 1: Olympus OM-2 with assorted lenses

My primary camera for taking photos is my father's old Olympus OM-2, a 35mm automatic-exposure film camera originally released in 1975. I love the weight and solid feeling of the metal body and all-metal components. I have collected 3 lenses from the OM series: 

• Olympus Zuiko 50mm f/3.4 (for most scenes, macro, and portraits)
• Olympus Zuiko 100-200mm f/5
• Olympus Zuiko 35mm f/?

So far, this camera has proven to be a great all-around system. It is just small enough that I can carry it on a shoulder strap while exploring new cities but offers all the features and interchangeable lenses that I want. (Plus it's cool to be using my dad's high-school camera.) 

Sadly, this camera's light meter and timing calibration are in need of service, so it'll be awhile before I can take new photos.

Camera 2: Reusable plastic 35mm camera with flash (e.g. the party camera)

I've opted to leave this as more of a category than a specific model of camera, because I have gone through about 3 since I started in 2021. I'm still yet to find one with a flash that lasts longer than 2-3 months of use. (The ones on the market now like the Kodak Ultra F9 are especially bad.)

The main purpose of this camera is to have a small, cheap flash film camera to take to parties and night events, where my OM-2 would be unwieldy (and flash-less).

In hopes of a better flash system and with the exciting prospect of getting 2x photos per roll, I am planning to try the Kodak Ektar H35 half-frame camera next.

Film Stocks

With the explosion in popularity of film photography since 2019/2020, finding (reasonably priced) film stock is harder than ever. In the past all of my photography has been with Fujifilm Fujicolor Superia 400. On a few occasions, cost and availability has pushed me to try Ilford SFX 200 and HP5 400 speed film, with only limited success.

Recently though, I have wanted to try alternatives to Fujicolor's green tint, and plan to try Kodak stocks such as UltraMax 400 and Portra 800.

Film developers

I have yet to take the very deep and expensive plunge into developing and/or scanning my own film, so for now I rely on film labs to do it for me. So far I have tried the following labs:

• Photoreal, downtown Brooklyn (low-quality scans)
• Eliz Digital, Manhattan Chinatown (low-quality scans)
• Bleeker Digital, Nolita (slightly better but still low-quality scans)
• State Film Lab, Louisville KY (best quality scans, slow turn-around, requires shipping)

Prioritizing scan quality, I have decided to stick with State Film Lab, as they're the only lab capable of producing scans which show individual film grains.

Future posts

In the future, I plan to release some of my past photography in a series of posts to this blog.