I am not a photographer.  Let’s just get that out of the way first off.  I am a musician, I am a software engineer, I even go so far as to classify myself a writer of sorts, but I have never claimed to be a photographer.  Like sculpture, painting, poetry, screen printing, jewelry making, and the many other forms of artistic creativity available to the interested individual, I have dabbled over the years.  I took some photography classes in high school.  I have shot and edited short films and god knows I’ve taken thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of photographs but I’ve never truly stopped to become informed or deeply involved in the craft.  I’ve been a dilettante at best.  More interested in photography as a way to document my life visually than as an artistic medium.

I’ve owned many cameras over the years, all point and shoot type things.  When I was a kid I had a little 110 Kodak Instamatic with one of those flash cube situations to take snapshots.  Something along these lines:

Later on in high school photography class I learned the basics of shooting with a manual 35mm SLR camera (probably a Pentax K1000 or Canon AE-1 or Minolta OM, I really don’t even remember what the school had available to shoot with) and I learned how to develop film and make prints in a darkroom with an enlarger.  While I did enjoy the experience, it wasn’t enough to inspire me to acquire any such gear for myself.  In my 20-something years I owned a variety of 35mm point and shoot rangefinder cameras with which I thoroughly documented the fact that I was alive in the 1990’s.  Then came the early 2000’s and my first couple of digital point and shoot cameras.  No more film developing!  Built in (terrible, lo-res) video!  I had a couple of those and then suddenly the camera on my iPhone 3G or 4 was good enough that I no longer felt the need and that was that.  I was kinda done with cameras.

This changed in perhaps 2013 or 2014 over Christmas when there was some sort of Black Friday deal at the local Wal-Mart for a Nikon D5100 and a couple of lenses for a ridiculously low price.  I had no idea there were only two of them available at the store and blithely went over to buy one, innocent of what a Wal-Mart Black Friday event was all about.  I was lucky enough to be the first person to ask about the camera and after waiting around for an hour or two I was one of two people who walked out with a new Nikon DSLR.  Nice.

This piqued my interest in photography a bit.  The quality of the photos I could get with each successive smartphone camera kept improving and the effects and filtering that were possible with apps got more powerful, but the quality of the image and the fun of using the camera were just somehow different with the Nikon.  I started thinking of it as “the good camera” or “the real camera” and everything else was just snapshots.  Again, not really into Proper Photography enough to know the difference between an F-stop and a bus-stop, but it certainly seemed more capable than even the best smartphone, regardless of the megapixel count.  Probably something to do with the lenses, I figured…

It’s no secret that I love to haunt estate sales, pawn shops, classified ad listings, thrift stores, and the like in search of unloved and inexpensive things that I might find interesting to play with.  I have seen tons of photography equipment float by over the years and the film gear always seemed to be cheap and, to me, not terribly interesting.  Why would I need film, after all?  It’s not as if I ever printed anything.  Hell, back when I took film photographs I rarely even saved the negatives.  However, on a lark I picked up a camera one day at an estate sale listed “AS-IS”.  It was a Nikon F65 35mm SLR with a couple of lenses and it was, I believe, $20.  I didn’t really care about the camera, I just thought that maybe the lenses would work with the digital Nikon D5100 I had been using for a few years.  My phone seemed to indicate that they would work and I grabbed the cam and lenses.  That was probably two years ago.

Another estate sale a few months ago (this one online, but local) and I threw a small bid at a goofy looking old folding camera called a Zeiss Ikonta.  I knew nothing about it but I remembered that Zeiss made good stuff and I thought it looked kinda cool.  Nobody else bid and I got the camera.  It turned out that it used a different film size, 120.  Now I was curious.  Could I learn how to take pictures with this thing?  If so, could I get them developed?  Could I develop them myself?  It sounded like a fun little diversion so down the internet rabbit hole I went.  Sure enough, I could buy the film and with a relatively small investment in some chemistry and basic equipment I could develop it at home.  Fun!

A week or so later and I was off to the races, taking terrible, underexposed, out of focus, badly developed photos and learning as I went.  I went ahead and dusted off the Nikon F65 and threw some film in it and took some pics with that too and scanned in the negatives from both cams.  One or two pics weren’t horrible.  Nice!

What happened next was probably predictable.  Whenever I learn about a new thing and start having fun I get a little obsessive.  A $100 bin full of random darkroom equipment picked up at another estate sale got me almost entire setup for a darkroom (minus the enlarger) and also netted me a couple of cool little sub-miniature spy cameras (including a black Minox B, which is rare and valuable and almost certainly was only in that bin because the sellers had no idea what it was).  Then I got an enlarger from Craigslist and now I’m starting to finally, after decades taking pictures, FINALLY learn enough about photography to be dangerous.  I gotta say, I’m enjoying it.  I’ve shot quite a few rolls of film in the last few weeks and as soon as one missing part arrives for my enlarger I hope to make some prints this weekend.

Here are some initial test images I’ve taken while figuring this stuff out….