Rollei Prego 90

Week 39 - Rollei Prego 90 that Brenda purchased for $20 on one of her antique shopping stops a few weeks ago. The camera is a kind of clunky point and shoot with a Schneider-Kreuznach AF-Variogon f=28-90mm HFT Makro lens. There is a panorama setting, various modes - macro/closeup, bulb, zone focus, portrait zoom, fuzzy zoom, step zoom, multiple exposure, continuous shooting, and also exposure compensation, red eye reduction, remote control and self timer. I would like to fully explore all the options on this camera and try it with different films.

I used RetroChrome 160 from my stash in the fridge, and I'm not sure what happened when I developed it, except maybe my E6 kit is expired. It was only the fourth roll that I've used with the kit, but I did mix it up a couple of months ago. Otherwise, the photos appear sharp and crisp aside from the wild colors in them. The problem with shooting a new camera each week is that I'm not able to fully explore the features of each one and give each a thorough workout. But the purpose of this personal film project is to try out each camera to see if they are functional and revisit the ones that I find interesting at a later date. The potential of this camera's features looks very good, though it's a bit larger for the pocket than say, the Olympus Stylus Epic Zoom 80 in my collection, which is much more compact and sleek.

I was behind a week on my film camera project due the amount of time that I was spending at my mother's place, but on Sunday, Brenda and I took a morning drive over to Gettysburg. It's one of my favorite places for a quick drive from Hanover, and great for landscape photos. I tried to carefully compose shots for this camera and the previous week's camera, but as you can see, they don't look as nice as they could with the botched E6 processing. Perhaps a nice black and white film would be better. The Rollei was easy to use, it has auto focus and of course the 28-90 zoom lens, with a LCD screen on top for the various settings and modes. It does require two CR123A batteries, which were a bit tricky to find locally, but Brenda found them at the Rite Aid Pharmacy.

Retro Slide Show!

Back in March of this year, I purchased an E6 (slide film) home developing kit from the Film Photography Project so that I could try making my own slides from the box of RetroChrome film in my fridge. I'll be honest here, I started developing my own film a while ago because it is much less expensive than mail order. I gradually dipped my toe in home developing when I read about caffenol developing several years ago and have progressed to other types of developing. I previously had a reliable develop-only option available at the local CVS, but they stopped in-store processing last year. The other local option is Walmart, which no longer returns your negatives, which I would scan on my Epson V500 Photo.

After having success with caffenol, Kodak D-76, and a couple of Unicolor C-41 kits, I wanted to try E6 processing at home - the cost of 1 mail order roll of slide film processing is almost as much as the kit costs, but I would be able to develop more rolls myself with the kit. I was really excited when I pulled the first rolls of slide film out of the tank to see beautiful positive images and couldn't wait to get them into slide mounts and project them. I scoured Craigslist for an inexpensive slide projector, finding a Vivitar 3000AF model with two extra trays and an extra bulb for $25. The drive to get the projector was over an hour away, but with the assurance of the owner that it was fully functional, Brenda I drove to Marysville, PA for the purchase. I was a bit annoyed that the owner wouldn't stop talking about the projector, when I had already told her that I wanted to buy it. Just take my money already and let us be on our way!

Now that we had the projector and fresh slides, I invited a friend of mine up for a home slide show and asked her to bring along some slides of her artwork that she had made years ago. Everything was great with the projector and the slides, but our makeshift screen from a large piece of foam board left a little to be desired. So, that evening, I was back on Craigslist looking for a portable projection screen and found one for $20. We picked it up along our Sunday drive around Lancaster County the next day.

The last thing I needed was more slide mounts - I bought a box of 500 Hama DSR one piece plastic mounts, which are very easy to use. I will be able to mount about 20 rolls of film with those, and I plan to be on the lookout for old slides at yard sales and flea markets for future home slide shows.

LoFi Chocolate Milk Box Camera - 52 Cameras, 52 Weeks

Week 26 - LoFi Chocolate Milk Box Camera with RetroChrome 320 from the Film Photography Project Store. The camera was purchased at FiveBelow for $1.99. The shutter button is the straw that sticks out of the top of the box camera. It has a 28mm f/9.5 lens with a photo taking distance of 1.0 and shutter speed of 1/100 sec. The side of the camera states that it is best used with 800 speed film. I maybe should have used the RetroChrome 160, as this roll came out overexposed on the sunny bright days that I used it.

I thought I could discreetly take photos while walking around Gettysburg with Brenda last Saturday, but I felt I looked somewhat conspicuous holding a chocolate milk box to my eye. So I tried just shooting a couple from the hip without really looking through the viewfinder. The camera was easy to carry around but the film counter wasn't working so I wasn't sure how many photos I had taken. I also used the camera on a lunch time walk up to the art supply store with my co-worker earlier this week.

I developed the film with my first ever E6 developing kit, after developing two other rolls first. The first two rolls came out properly exposed (probably because of the auto exposure settings on those two cameras). As you can see, these came out much lighter, I'm happy with the way some of them look though.

The slide film positives were scanned with Epson V500 Photo.