Tag: traditional

20yr old Kodak Gold

How did the old film trial go? Come in and take a peek.

I posted earlier today Well, that was most enjoyable! Regarding popping out for a morning stroll and taking a 48 year old camera with me to shoot a roll of film that had expired 20 years since.

The camera

At 20 years old, the roll was an experiment where i exposed at normal settings, +1 stop overexposed and +2 stops overexposed. I obtained 39 exposures, always possible from a 36 exposure roll, I won’t bother you with them all, just 2 from each exposure range with a brief description. Don’t expect fine art here, it was a snap session to test a number of factors and to see how the film has deteriorated over time.

These pictures have not been retouched apart from having a frame put around them. They are as scanned, for authentic representation.

200ASA

The advertised, original roll ASA rating. Very low expectations and it didn’t disappoint.

Extremely underexposed
Again under exposure, and a brown hint

At 200ASA the shots were certainly under exposed. The pictures have a cast over them and after development there is a lot of curl on the emulsion (Age) and the base of the film also has a darker tone, creating that yellow brown cast.

100ASA (+1 stop overexposed)

The best two exposures represent the first overexposure of one stop from 200ASA to 100ASA.

Pretty nice overall exposure
Again nice exposure and highlights very prominent

At 100ASA everything seems quite acceptable. There is that hue over the film still, and highlights seem quite prominent. Grain is present but not too distracting.

50ASA (+2 stops overexposed)

If you work by the suggested standard of one stop of exposure for every 10 years then this should be the standard. However I’m not so sure.

Nice colour, highlight prominent and quite a bit of a yellow hue, would need adjustment post processing
Could have been taken in the late 70s or early 80s

So with the exposure at 50ASA we have now introduced quite a bit of grain, a yellow hue and quite prominent highlights. I’m sure all of these pictures would post process fine if run through photo shop or light room. But to be quite honest I love that retro look that they have.

For me i’d probably aim at the 100ASA +1 stop of overexposure on the remaining rolls I have, I believe that would be quite enough, however even the 50ASA option is not too bad though you would require a lot of post working and you’d have quite a noticeable size grain.

Horses for courses as they say, but I’m going down the +1 stop overexposure route for the next film.

I found a little local photo store here in Leicestershire called Classic photo supplies, who specialise in all film processing, supply, printing and Sundry items. The owner Brett invited me in and we just chatted classic photography whilst my film was developing. He’s a super guy, and I’m all for supporting small businesses, so this is my new go to lab. The scans were done and over to me by email within an hour, super quick service. I’ll pick the negatives up in the week when I drop off another film to be developed and scanned.

Thanks for passing by. As always I am honoured by your presence.

Thanks. For your time.

Not the lottery, but for me – just as good

I’ve been after a couple of cameras for quite a while now that hold a great deal of sentimental meaning to me. This will become apparent when i publish the individual posts for them, but for now i just want to share the result of an auction i participated in on the 31st July 2025.

A Canon A1 and an Olympus trip

Today I’ve probably made the best purchase off of an auction site that I have ever made previous. I’ve been following a number of Canon A1s lately and they have all been going in the £120+GBP bracket, some even higher than that. Today I have lost out on two that sold for £93 for a damaged body and one for £121 that was just a body but of a much better quality. This particular auction I was watching was for an untested duo of cameras, a Canon A1 as well as an Olympus Trip 35mm. The Olympus alone normally commands the high £80GBP range and both of these were in this particular auction. I was just watching as this was going to sky rocket in my opinion, two good cameras from a respected seller who I have used before. Two minutes from the auction end, bidding was sat at £39GBP and I thought that any second now the price was going to go crazy, especially in the last 30 seconds. I put in a max bid of £55GBP for the lot, as I pretty much knew it would sail past that amount and go for a price in the £150-£200 price range. I hit the bid button with 20 seconds left on the auction….

You have won – congratulations!

I thought you’re having a laugh, no way. And then it came up with the winning bid being £39:00GBP no one else was bidding, crazy.

The A1 camera consists of the body, a winder, an FD 50 1:1.8 lens, a camera manual as well as a lens manual.

Postage was the grand total of £4:99 so my total for these two cameras was £43:99GBP. That is nuts, and to say I’m pleased about this is the understatement of the century. I have two of the cameras I wish for the most, and I have just landed the bargain of the day, I was in the right place at the right time. Wow. It’s unusual to catch other auction bidders sleeping, it will probably never happen again for me, it’s a very rare occurrence. Two cameras of this magnitude for £22:00GBP each! That’s unheard of.

I don’t know for what reason they are not working, as they both appear to be quite tidy examples. I have used this seller before and the posting above could also be worded such as to imply that the units may well not have been tested. But, that’s what this site is about, repairing old cameras and getting them working again. There’s no fun in talking about a good functional camera, that’s boring. We want the meat and potatoes as they say, we want to see things being fixed, or broken further….you never know with me.

Thanks for sharing my excitement at this purchase. It will all make sense once i’ve assessed the cameras and carried out any repairs.

Thank you for passing by. It’s always appreciated.

How often do you use a traditional camera?

I’m genuinely interested to find out just how many people use a traditional style camera. Film or digital I’m not fussed, just anything other than the Mobile phone cameras of today.

Loads of Slr/Dslr cameras

I posted an item way back in the early days of this site, that gave numbers of roughly how many cameras have been produced up until 2022 and it was a phenomenal figure in the region of 45 Billion. That’s enough for 5.5 cameras for every single person on this planet. Vintage Camera figures

Ok. This figure does include all mobile phone cameras as well as CCTV cameras, but even if you halved this figure there is an immense amount of traditional hand held cameras still out there.

But how often do you see one being used? Where are they all? I must admit the only time i see them in use is if I go somewhere such as Iceland, you do see a lot of the Far Eastern tourists still using them, but when I get home there is nothing seen at all. I must admit when I go out with one of my old cameras I don’t half get some funny looks, as if I’m some kind of weird trend setter, believe me, I’m anything but.

I would just like to do a very brief straw poll as such to see just how often we use a traditional style camera. As I said at the top, I’m not bothered if it’s digital or traditional film, just as long as its sole purpose is to take photographs. So please don’t include mobile phones, computers or tablets. Just a handheld lump, a piece that just serves the purpose of photography. This poll will remain open for a week.

Oh, and I’ve just found out you can do these poll type things on WP so I had to give it a try. Please forgive me as I’m easily distracted / pleased 😂

Have a super day and thank you for visiting…and voting. Much appreciated.

Tradional pub skittles

My wife is a fantastic organiser. The family owes an awful lot to her as she always arranges meals and get togethers keeping us all in touch. Without her doing this I very much believe we’d all lose contact quite rapidly. She keeps the family together. And she is brilliant at what she does.

Today is one of those days, Easter Saturday, she has hired the Skittle alley at our local pub and we are all meeting there for a meal prior to throwing our “Cheeses” at the skittles. No perfectly round balls here, these are good old solid wood, full of splinters and shaped more like tin cans to be honest. And they can go off in any direction, there is no way to control them. Just don’t get in their way!

We play it differently up here in the East Midlands as can be seen here:

In the East Midlands, people play Long Alley in which the projectiles are rough balls or small capsule shaped logs called “cheeses” and a score is only made if the cheeses bounce a single time just in front of the pins.

Wikipedia

It can be quite brutal. But that’s how we roll in the East Midlands 😂

Our local

It’s a beautiful old pub, and we kind of adopted it when we moved up here. A right old traditional pub. I think there is about 22 of us up there tonight from all different areas, so it should be a nice evening.

Tomorrow is a different story when we will all be off to watch our home football team get slaughtered at home to our visitors- Liverpool.

But let’s not get too depressed about that, here’s how today has gone instead.

Paul wins the skittles
Winner and his prize.

4 rounds of 3 cheeses each and we had sorted out the final four of the contest, cousin Paul wins outright and wins the first prize a Cadbury crème egg. Highest score of the evening went to niece Julie who managed to down eight skittles in one round.

Overall winner Paul, and high scorer Julie.

The remainder of the evening was just people talking and catching up. It was a lovely day and My wife has already sorted out the Christmas party dinner. She’s so damned organised.

The day started at our house earlier when everyone went down our garden pub to play darts, have a drink and kick the day off in a really fun and friendly fashion. It’s ended around 12 hours later when the tiredness sets in and people start to make their excuses and gradually filter off into the night.

In the bar, after.

Tomorrow we go again when we meet at my nieces home for her house warming party. It’ll be a little more subdued as some are back to work on Monday, however I’m really looking forward to meeting up with them all again.

Good times. Good company. Nothing beats it.

More Camera statistics

Back in March 2023 in the early days of this site I threw some figures out there regarding the amount of cameras on the planet up to and including 2022, you can read that post here: Vintage Camera figures

In this post I’m going show a graph and some figures regarding the decline of DSLR ( Digital Single Lens Reflex ) in the last 12 yrs.

It’s becoming obvious that people are ditching the traditional camera frame for the mobile phone and tablet approach and the figures you see in decline for traditional cameras have probably gone in the total reverse and multiplied many times over for the latter. It hurts the brain to realise the total amount of picture capture devices out there, as well as the waste that this produces as a result of what has become a throwaway society in which we all must share some guilt.

I can honestly state that in the last 12 months I have purchased close to 60 Cameras, 18 radios about 14 portable cd and tape players and not one of them has been disposed of much to my wife’s displeasure. (To be honest she’s very supportive of what I do as it keeps me out of mischief.)

Anyway I’m starting to drift a bit, so in my last post back in 23 I think I stated that there were estimated in 2022 to be something like 45 Billion photo capture devices on the planet, enough for 5.5 units per person that inhabits this Ball floating in space, a phenomenal number. And now there are probably even more.

The traditional camera is being ditched though and as you can see in this graph supplied by Statista It is a seriously declining part of the consumer market.

DSLR decline courtesy of Statista

The number of digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera shipments worldwide has been on a downhill ride since 2012. In 2023, a total of around 1.18 million DSLR cameras were shipped by *CIPA companies all over the world. Despite the decline in shipments, the average price of digital cameras per unit has continued to remain stable.

In eleven years the annual sales of a DSLR has dropped by almost 16 million units in 2012 to a paltry 1.18 million in 2023, as I’ve stated the sales of mobile devices have probably quadrupled and risen in the opposite direction.

The question is, are traditional cameras going to be more of an antiquity in the near future or will there always be a demand? There are so many out there that I can’t see them commanding any good price through rarity as there are just so many out there.

I learnt my trade in photography back in the late 70s early 80s. Back then we did everything by hand from mixing the chemicals, manually printing using enlargers and various types of papers, dryers and drums. Dodging and shading, manually touching up any defects as work was produced. We even made dupe trans, did letrasetting and made the boss man tea. A computer does it all now….apart from the tea but I bet that’s on the horizon.

The chemicals we mixed were in 100 litre batches and were pure poison. E6 Colour developer contained Hydroquinone, and the final bath (Stabiliser) all this chemical was pure formaldehyde, we never had masks or gloves back then and after mixing a batch of these chemicals you were out in the yard for a good half hour coughing your guts up. There were many other chemicals involving ammonia and powdered citric acid and these were just a few of what we used. If you could only imaging the shear hell we went through for you to get your photographs.

Probably why I have such bad Bronchitis and Asthma nearly 45 years on.

What I’m saying is the digital world of today is immense progression and removes all that danger away from the business. It’s killed the business as much as any other big business out there. But it’s probably not as much fun or as much pleasure as doing the whole process by hand using traditional skills. Heck I bet that will kick start a conversation between the traditionalists and modernists.

Whatever way we look at things, time moves on, progression is always going to occur and we must (Even though we don’t always want to) adapt to change. And it’s going to change for everyone big time in the next decade or so.

Even though it’s like saying goodbye for a final time to a dear old friend. I enjoyed my role I played in it.

Supplementary notes

*CIPA stands for “Camera & Imaging Products Association”, which is the trade association of the Japanese photo industry.

The section “digital cameras” includes the following producers: Olympus, Casio, Canon, Kodak, Sanyo Electric, Sigma, Seiko Epson, Sony, Tomy, Nikon, Panasonic, Fujifilm, Hoya, Ricoh.