Charity Shop Goodness

So, it’s happened.

As you will know, avid reader, after getting very interested in photography alongside my undergraduate dissertation, I bought myself a DSLR about 18 months ago.

I remember as a teenager also being quite into photography and admiring my neighbour and scout leader who had SLR cameras, but such things being out of my reach.

In Poverty Aid a couple of weeks ago I found, for less than a tenner, a Praktica TL5-B with two lenses. Praktica was a brand of camera manufactured by Pentacon in Dresden in eastern Germany, within the GDR between 1949 and the German reunification in 1990 and by all accounts these represent good old German engineering. The Lenses are a Pentacon 50mm f/1.8 (which is the stock lens) and a Carl Zeiss Jena 135mm f/3.5 which my all accounts is actually worth a pretty penny.

So what do I do with this thing? OK, so from the DSLR I have a reasonble understanding now of Exposure and so on, but film. This is scary. A trip to Jessops and a Couple of Rolls of Fujicolor C200 which appears to be the go to consumer film and I will give this a go…

These are some of the results from the first film. I’m gobsmacked. I expected this to go horribly wrong but these (scanned by me from the Jessops Prints) are just something else.

I suspect this may become an addiction.