Week 10 camera is my newly acquired Nikon EM. I bought this recently from KEH Camera as I wanted to have a small Nikon Film SLR to carry in my bag for upcoming Spring outings to festivals, nature walks, and day hiking. I have a nice Nikon E Series 50mm 1.8 prime lens to use with it, and aside from manual focusing, I should be able to concentrate on framing up my photos instead of fiddling with the settings. The Nikon EM is a battery powered compact film SLR that features aperture priority semi-automatic exposure control. It was designed for beginners wanting to purchase an inexpensive interchangeable lens camera. Though not highly successful in it's time, the Nikon EM and Series E lenses are a good price/performance value in the used market. I purchased this bargain rated camera for $14 from KEH Camera and had previously purchased the Nikon Series E 50mm 1.8 pancake lens for $49 from Ebay. The lens of course, can be used on other Nikon cameras, of which I have two others.

When I pick out a camera for the week, I like to carry it with me and just get random photos of whatever Brenda and I might doing that week. This week was hard, my father passed away and we were having his visitation and memorial services over the weekend. But I needed to try to be doing the things that I enjoy to ease the emotional, exhausting time that our family was going through. Some of these photos will be a reminder of this time when I look at them in the future, as is the case with almost every photo that I take. Most of the photos on this roll were taken on a nature walk at La-Ho trail at Lake Marburg, in Hanover, PA the day after my father's memorial service. It was a beautifully sunny day which was comforting and gave me something to look forward to - the coming warm and sunny weather of Spring and Summer.

I cross-processed the film in a Unicolor C-41 kit from Film Photography Project and scanned the negatives with an Epson V500 Photo flatbed scanner. I like the amber cast that came through on some of the nature shots and also the coloring on the photos of the abandoned buildings, giving them a sepia antique photo quality. Only minor adjustments were made to the negative scans, using the levels adjustment in Photoshop to pick out the lightest and darkest parts of each scan. I would like to try this camera and lens with the expired Portra 160 NC film that I have and also with black and white film.

A couple of weeks ago, Brenda and I attended the 8mm movie screening of "The Basement" at Midtown Cinema in Harrisburg, PA sponsored by Film Photography Project. The Film Photography Project is my favorite podcast to listen to while commuting to my job in Baltimore. I listen to several other film photography and camera related podcasts, but this is the one that brought my love of collecting old box cameras and shooting and developing my own film together. I have been collecting old cameras, mostly Kodak Brownie type box cameras, since I purchased my first antique camera and a box of junk for $2.00 at a fire department auction back in 1989. The mirror was broken in the Spartus Full-Vue faux TLR film camera, but I took it apart and had a small mirror cut to replace the old one. My then mother-in-law bought me a roll of film to try it out and then I put the camera on the shelf and started my collection of vintage cameras. Several years ago I was intrigued when I saw a video on using Fuji peel-apart film in old Polaroid Pack cameras. I was amazed that film was still being made for these cameras and then I remembered that I had a Polaroid One Step in my studio closet. A search for Polaroid cameras on Youtube turned up a whole slew of videos by Film Photography Project and I proceeded to watch every one of them. Seeing that film was still being made for most of the cameras in my collection, I started a quest to shoot a roll of film in each one of my working cameras, now numbering over 100. So after finding the Film Photography Podcast several years ago on Itunes and listening to the entire back catalog and also keeping up with the current episodes, I was excited that I could meet the hosts from the show at the movie screening in Harrisburg. "The Basement" was a fun movie to watch and Brenda won an awesome Nikon N50 SLR with a Sigma 28-200mm zoom lens and I scored some free film (you might say that I won the camera, as Brenda has since given it to me). The next day I took the Nikon around town loaded with a roll of Svema 125 color film from the prize pack, then developed the film later that evening. I used the auto settings on the camera and plan to give it another test this weekend down in Washington, D.C. when we go to visit my son. A few samples from the Svema roll are shown here.