Sunday, August 7, 2011

The reward of patience and perseverance!

It's been a long time for me not to post anything here. I was busy the whole summer with my labworks and report (I slept at dawn for a few days at the last weeks). But then, good things happen to those who wait. And my reward (beside 12 hours hibernation after poster presentation of my summer research work) was...



Yep, I've got a lomo. Supersampler, to be exact.

But why do I suddenly have it? Am I going back to the stone age of taking photos with film (in this case is the 35mm one)?

One friend was giving away a few stuffs because he was going to moving to another country.. The supersampler is really old, he had this when he was still in school in Indonesia. He doesn't use it anymore now, so he decided to give it to this girl, a junior of his, who was quite into taking photos, for FREE =D It's a multi-lens camera, so the result may be really unpredictable because I haven't found any information on how it exactly works. I'll only see how they turn out to be after the 36th exposure and taking them to a developer, which may happen sometime between 3 to 6 months later (I won't take photos so often with it, only on special occasions or if I find nice objects) so we'll see =)

IMHO, even though digital photography is of course much less costly and easier (e.g. people can erase the bad shoots and enhance the acceptable shoots), film photography is irreplaceable with its certain effects (to be exact: its unknown, sometimes-unexpected turnout) and the mindset of to shoot correctly, every-shoot-counts feature. The latter is what I am trying to do with my digital camera as well: to take photos correctly everytime so all my shots are acceptable and free from significant enhancements afterwards.

I'm still on training to do film (35mm) photography, though, because the last time I took photos with PnS, 35mm film cameras was about 10 years ago before finally my family moved on to digital cameras because of the cost.. So I still need to re-train my hand and my head to prevent those shaky, blurry, useless images as well as to load/unload/rewind/advance films and shoot correctly, get a nice object with good exposures etc.
"Think before you speak, act, and shoot." - Me.

Anyway, these are the complete squad of this thing:


I have two films. Below is the one that the past owner gave me:


Expired film!
Yeah, welcome to the world of weird colors. Don't know what I'll get =D
The other one was a new film I bought recently due to some accident and youtube advices.. Good thing is that the advice was true and do-able, otherwise my S$5.50 would have been gone useless. I wanted to buy the provia film instead but the seller didn't have it.

Next target? SLR camera. I hope the ones at my home in Indo still work =) And maybe some darkroom skills, at least to see if the synthetic lab training (and soon-to-be-teaching) has any use for this.

Anyway, once I found out that the old supersampler could work and after reported it to the past owner, I called my dad, who is into photography as well (is interest inherited by genetics?). I told him that his little girl had just gotten herself a 35mm film camera.

His initial response? "HUH?" in a surprised, worried-about-the-cost way.

No comments: