Emily and Kelly's Excellent Adventure!

Emily and I are starting a spur of the moment road trip up the northern CA coast this weekend! Emily has been awesome and basically planned everything- here is our proposed route.  I am going to take the Amtrak from Davis to Oakland where she will pick me up and we will begin our journey.  We will sleep in Mendocino, Humboldt Redwood SP, Eureka and Redding with stops along the way wherever we see fit.  Maybe Emily has a more thought out plan than that but as far as I know we are playing it by ear. I don't really care, I am just excited to be going somewhere!

I am really excited about taking some pictures! I finally figured out how to load the 120 film into the Argus 75 (had to trim off the edges of the spool) so I am ready to shoot!  There are only 12 pics per roll and I only have one roll so I have to really plan out each shot.  This will be such a different feel than shooting with the digital camera.  With digital I just take as many pictures as I want, get all the different angles, lighting etc., and then pick the best one once I download on to the computer.  I have found that the ones that look the best to me through the viewfinder are not always my favorites once they appear on my screen.  So I will really have to dig deep and find my inner photographer to get some good shots.  Then I will have to figure out how/where the heck I am going to get the film developed.  But that's a whole other post.

New Argus 75

Yay! My new camera finally came! On the left is a picture of the front- the button with the white dot is the shutter; the knob on the left side is the film winder. That's pretty much all there is to it! The top glass is for the view finder and the bottom is the actual lense.  The red flips away when you take the picture and then you wind the film knob until it reappears.  On the right is a shot of the view finder in its flipped up position.  The image is so clear and nice- the pictures don't do it justice.

I played around with the through the view finder shots.  As you can see my first shot had lots of glare from reflection off the glass.  I remedied this by hiding me and the digital camera under a blanket while I took the shot.

yay! problem solved! Now I just need to find something more interesting than my living room to take a picture of..

New Camera!

I love old stuff and lately I have been wanting to get an old (antique-old) camera to play with.  I wanted to be able to use medium format film and to do some fun through the viewfinder (TTV) shots with my macro lens.  I also think it will be helpful in becoming a better photographer to have a simple film camera to play with. I had been monitoring etsy and ebay and finally came across one that was advertised as 'working' and not just 'as is' on ebay.  Its an Argus 75 twin lens.  It has a fun flip up view finder and takes 620 film, which according to the internet is 120 film rolled onto a different sized spool. And best of all it was only $12!  I am sure it will take me a while to find film and figure out how to get it into the camera but the TTV stuff should be fun in the meantime!