My muse on film (Patreon)

Scarlete

This shoot was shot on film with my Nikon F65.

And on the day of the shoot, I realized that the autofocus wasn’t working. Something had broken - either in the camera or the lens - so I had to focus everything manually.

And I’m normally fine with manual focus, but on this camera it’s absolute hell because I CAN’T SEE SHIT through the viewfinder 😭 It was genuinely so hard to understand where the focus was. At some point I actually started thinking that my eyesight was getting worse and maybe I needed to see a doctor because I literally couldn’t see what was in focus anymore.

It was also pretty dark inside, so I shot some of it with flash because I was already expecting the whole thing to be a disaster.

Later I found out that no, apparently I’m not going blind. My viewfinder is just really bad, dark and dirty, which makes manual focusing almost impossible.

So yeah. I shot around three rolls of film, and these 23 photos are basically what survived and what I can actually share with you. Some are slightly out of focus, some miraculously landed exactly where they were supposed to.

Would I call this shoot a failure? Not really.

There were just A LOT of “buts” that day. It was dark, focusing was a nightmare, working with the model wasn’t the easiest, and at some point I wasn’t even sure what I was doing anymore. And despite all of that, I still got some frames I genuinely didn’t expect to love this much.

Like the first one with the kitty. I’m still ridiculously happy about that one.

So, here they are.

P.S. 4 month later.... If you think I fixed my camera after this - you’re wrong. I’ve already shot with it a couple more times, still manually focusing, still swearing at it. So yeah. That’s where we are.