I have a camera habit

On Monday this week, I needed to get out of the house and wanted to give the Kodak 66 another run out. The shots started on picture 4 because I messed up when I loaded the film. The CineStill 50D film will be great I hope, but I wasn’t convinved when I loaded it and winded it on. The bottom of the film creased up a little and didn’t fit as well as the Fujifilm. The other problem is that it is very difficult to see how far the film has been wound on and I wound it past the first three exposures. I’ll find out in a couple of days if everything worked out. There’s an Ilford black and white film in the camera now and this one is just as hard to see. The good news is that I was ready for it this time and it’s definitely on exposure 1.

When I was out taking pictures, I found an antique/old brick-a-brac shop. My camera radar was telling me that there may be a camera in there. I found an old East German camera which looked low quality and them some other dusty ones that looked more basic. Then, on a final look around downstairs, I found something shiny. I may not have walked in the shop if I hadn’t decided to sit down and have a beer in the pub just across the way. If I hadn’t had that beer, I would have spent less time counting the last of my change on the counter to find £17.50 – down from £19.50 when I showed an interest. The camera was a beautiful Kodak Retinette 1b. As far as I can see, it’s in great condition.

Autumn is in full swing and chances for great pictures are easy to find, so I headed to the woods to shoot off 36 exposures of 35mm film. Despite reading the manual, I missed something very important about re-winding the film. There’s a button next to the wind-on lever that I didn’t know about. That explains the horrible noise when I tried to re-wind the film. I made this worse by opening the camera and exposing the film. This happened in dim light, so this may not have caused too much of a problem. Snappy Snaps told me that the pictures (if any) will be ready on Saturday. If any of them develop I’ll buy another film. I’ll probably try it again anyway, now that I know what I’m doing.

This weekend, I will be away up North. The Kodak 66 is loaded and ready to go. I could bring the 1b, but that will be for another day. I’m confident it will be £17.50 well spent.