Håkon Borgen 1/12/20 Håkon Borgen 1/12/20

First roll of film (Fuji Superia 200)

In March of 2019, I when to visit my girlfriend’s mom for the first time. After me nervously talking about me and myself, I started talking about photography and that I wanted to do a project photographing old cameras. She presided to tell me that she used to take photos with film before and that she may have a camera lying around somewhere.

After some hours she found the well preserved Olympus OM10 from the addict. The camera bag included a 50mm F1.8, a 80-200mm F4.5 a wide converter for the 50mm, a flash and alot of filters. She also had three rolls of Fujifilm Superia 200 in-store that I got to try out, the only problem was that it was expired in 2013 and I didn’t know if it would work. But after some hours of rigorously googling the subject, I found out some things that I could try to be able to get something on the film.

My project started with wanting to take digital photos of the camera to showcase its cool look, but I decided to give it a try. I found out that it may need more light to get the correct exposure. I got the rolls from her so that I could try film without spending money, but only hours after going home with the camera I had found out that if I bought an adapter I could mount the OM lenses to the Fuji system. That’s the point when my collection of lenses and vintage cameras started growing massively. The website “Finn.no” or the Norwegian version of craigslist is a place you can find everything you want, sadly for my bank account.

Olympus OM10 with 50mm F1.8 (Shot with Fujifilm X-T3 and 35mm F1.4)

With the film being expired in 2013, as the total analog newbie I was, I decided to shoot all my photos at the widest aperture available F1.8 and some higher to see the difference. The Olympus OM10 has the ability to be able to adjust the aperture, but not the shutter speed. It has a built-in light meter that decides the shutter speed for you. Well here’s the shots:

Although I didn’t have a clue about what I was doing, I liked the results. In hindsight, what I should have done, was to take the photos at a half a stop higher (250-320? ISO and keep that Aperture and shutter speed the same as I would otherwise). Can you tell from the pictures that it expired or is it just me being inexperienced?

I feel like going back to shooting analog has helped me understand photography and my digital camera more than I could ever do with just shooting digital. Before shooting analog, I used Aperture priority almost 99% of the time. Now, 9 months later, I get frustrated whenever I can’t have full control.

More to come! Shot around 20 rolls of film in 2019.