A brief history of film

Being stranded and without really having anything much to shoot I’ve slowly been delving into the dusty boxes of yesteryear, those containing my trusty old film cameras. Most have not been used for 17-20 years, and have fallen into a state of unloved decay, which is a real shame. Anyway, I’ve set about trying to revive them and run a roll or 2 of film through them, as they have a deep connection to much of my work through the 90’s. and into the new millennium.

In addition to the Noblex panoramic that I fired up a week ago (and which is struggling some), I found my beloved Hasselbad X Pan, which I sent for repair a year ago, and which is in need to some excessively costly repairs. It’s now something of a classic, and I carried that camera with its cumbersome weight all over the world on my bike, and yet hardly shot more tea a few rolls of film on it.

There’a also couple of plastic Lomo cameras in there - the Holga and Diana, again, bought on a whim, and well - kinda fun but a tad hipsters for my liking, although as they have no mechanical bits I will get them working, as the results are quite appealing, in a heavily filtered kind of way.

Then there’s my old Ricoh GR1, a lovely but very finicky piece of kit, that was in my back pocket for many years, and also went in for revival a while back, and is also lacking power - so, I guess it will have to find another fixer before I get to use it again.

The fab four SLR film cameras bellow are all Canon EOS’s. There’s my first ever SLR (the 1,000), which I bought secondhand in 1991. Then there’s my most used EOS 5 and reserve 50E. The 1N was bought secondhand from another photographer, and it’s never been out of the box - something I really need to address (if it still lives).