You look real good today...

Adventures in Film | Bay Area photographer

Written By:

Maryam Salassi

Oct 7, 2016

I was rummaging through some old things and found an old Felica camera my dad had given me when I was studying photography in college. It was his when he was a teenager, so the camera is about 50 years old.  I don’t know why I never tested it out when I had access to a dark room and was able to develop my old film, but I figured it was finally time to see if it worked. Side note, after having only really developed my own film, it was a shock to see how much it is to develop film and have it scanned. I love film and ideally I want to do all my sessions on film (on a much more reliable camera, of course), but I’m going to have to take that into consideration for sure!

I had some expired black and white 120 film packed away so I pulled that out, and bought a few rolls of 120 color film off Amazon as well. The back of the camera has a small circular window that is tinted red so you can see what frame the film is on when you’re advancing it. This isn’t a problem when you’re using black and white film (think about how a dark room light tends to be red or amber), but color film is sensitive to all light and even the miniscule amount that comes through leaves an impression. Hence the numbers and dots imposed on the color images. I think the weird mottled quality of the color images is due to the light coming through the black paper that backs the film…pretty interesting!

I am definitely going to play more with this camera, but in the future I’ll have to figure out how many turns it takes to advance the film for each frame, and just cover the back window for clearer pictures. I hope you enjoy my little experiments and find them as interesting as I do! Cheers!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *