Another exception to the “one post each Wednesday” rule: Yesterday, I received the developed roll of film I shot with the Rollei 35 S (see my earlier post). When I handed in the exposed film last Monday and I were told that I can come back on Friday afternoon, I was quite nervous – and this for several reasons: new and fully manual camera (I’ve received the Rollei just a couple of days before), first experience in film photography in many years, the ISO 400 HP5+ pushed to 1,600, and need to compensate in terms of exposure, because I used yellow filter. Afterward, I really asked myself if I had not pushed the experience too far with too many experiments in this first roll of film with the Rollei. For those reasons at least, I was feeling rather jittery when I went to the photo lab Friday afternoon because I was afraid that the number of experiments led to a very poor result or no images at all. When talking to the photo lab owner, she told me that all worked out quite well and that the experiment succeeded. Except for two pictures with rather unwanted blur, all pictures were actually quite ok. And the good news: especially the photos I took of my daughter are excellent – but probably I am not the most objective person to judge when it comes to a picture of my baby girl… When arriving at home, I just carried out some very minimalistic treatments within Lightroom – mainly some exposure corrections – but no cropping at all. After a closer look, I saw as well that my distance estimations weren’t completely out of range when adjusting the focus – especially later the day I worked with a wide aperture and slow shutter speed what considerably reduced the error margin in terms of zone focusing.

Below are six of the 36 pics of the roll. I have to say that getting out in the streets with the Rollei and taking my time for taking pictures was really fun. The small camera is fun to use although you need to keep in mind that the camera does nothing for you and you need to change all parameters to the current situation. This first experience was great and seeing that the pictures did come out more or less well exposed and more or less well in focus, I cannot wait to get out again with this small camera. Next time, I will probably try out another roll of film as well – I heard a lot of good thing about the Pan F 50 by Ilford.