Wherein rambling takes place about shooting old cameras, bulk loading film, etc etc..

This morning I got an early start taking Ruckus for a walk around the neighborhood. I grabbed my camera before I walked out the door but he is such a handful to take for a walk because he needs constant work on reactivity training that I didn’t take a single photograph on our walk. In retrospect I don’t know why I actually thought I’d be able to. But it was a beautiful morning, so when we got back home I decided to head back out the door with the ol’ Canon 5D and see what the world had to offer. It was a nice walk, the kind of walk I usually engage in. I throw a camera around my neck, head out the door and wander around somewhat aimlessly, allowing the world to show me what’s worth paying attention to. Photography is ultimately just an art of paying attention, after all. There’s technical stuff involved in there but all the technical prowess amounts to nothing if you’re not paying attention.

On another note, I’ve really been wanting to get back to shooting some film, specifically some black and white film but I’ve been putting off loading up the bulk loader and rolling film. So today I finally stopped procrastinating and pulled the 100ft roll of Kentmere 400 out of the fridge and grabbed the changing bag and got the whole ensemble set up and loaded a handful of 36 shot rolls so I’d have them to grab and load in to the camera. If you like to shoot film and aren’t bulk loading film you’re throwing away money, honestly. A 100ft roll of Kentmere is around 100 bucks, and with 18 rolls out of 100ft it’s about $6 per roll. To be fair the number of film stocks available in 100ft rolls for a decent price is dwindling but as a general rule if you can get the 100ft roll for a decent price you can save a decent amount per roll over buying individual rolls of film.

I’ve also been wanting to shoot my old Zorki 1 some more because I seem to get in to phases where I romanticize the shooting experience of that camera and have the urge to shoot it until I put a few rolls through it and realize it’s not a magical tool. I wrote a whole piece about this several years ago on here but apparently I don’t learn my lesson. I’m forever looking for the magic of shooting my old Leica III apparently. And even though I know it’s not magic, there is something really fun about that stripped down shooting experience on those super early rangefinders. It’s everything you need to make a picture in a tool and absolutely nothing you don’t. I want to run some color film through it too since I need to start working through the color film in the fridge and tackle the task of finally developing the color film. Send positive vibes… Anyways, that about sums it up for this post. A nice day of walking and making photographs, bulk rolling film, and talking about old Soviet cameras.