New Roll / New Camera / Thoughts (Patreon)

The cameras are thick on the ground here, a blessing in these trying times. My wife, lovely as always, bought me a Nikon N60 from the used case at our local camera shop as a Christmas gift. This is the first test roll through it.

The N60 is a pretty mid-tier 90s consumer SLR without too many bells or whistles, but because it's a 90s SLR, it has 1) shockingly quick autofocus, especially with Nikkor AF-D lenses, which I'm stacked to the gills with and 2) very good matrix metering. It also is the only film SLR I've got with an actual flash on the body, which is a nice bonus.

I'm currently working on a video/camera review for the Nikkormat FTN; if people watch that video when it's finished, I'll make one for the N60 too.

This roll is off that camera. The film stock is "Fuji" 400. It's not actually Fujifilm-produced film (i.e. Superia), unfortunately, as Fuji loathes making film aside from Instax, and discontinued in-house production of basically everything that isn't Provia or Velvia (thank God for small favors). This is, instead, reboxed Kodak Ultramax 400. I bought it because it was slightly cheaper as a 3-pack than 3 rolls of Ultramax, and I was curious if Moody's scanner would parse it differently (it didn't, really).

As a result, it's fairly similar to other consumer-grade Kodak stuff... which is more or less the only option for color 400+ ISO film now aside from Lomo (which is either weird, ugly stuff or also reboxed Kodak) or Cinestill (which, as I've covered, is just... reboxed Kodak cine film). Ah, the many wonderful choices provided by capitalism!

I shot a lot of weird street photography on this roll because I am trying to change the way I approach it. It's several-fold: Some of these, like the shot at the start of this email, I want to be so immersed in my surroundings and self that the shots hit me like lightning. That photo truly did almost knock me over; I was walking along, stopped dead in my tracks, stood back two feet, and lined up that perfectly geometrical composition.

 Some of these, I'm trying to be more imaginative, and instead of shooting from a distance, I want to physically place myself into an environment I would normally walk past (like a children's playground, above).

 And as always, structuring in the imagery of the world to make a political or social point is an important consideration. This has, historically, been my strongest area, but I think to complete a genuinely overarching street-photo work, I need to have shots from every category possible.

I genuinely do not know if these visual methods will work for other people, but I really like it, and in a week so troubling it has me finding comfort in Camus, that's really all I needed.

 The remainder of the shots on this roll are from my Christmas, which I spent with my wife well out of range of cell signal and the modern world at the National Park Inn, at the foot of Tahoma. We sadly did not see The Mountain on the trip, but it was still enjoyable.

As always, the full roll is viewable at Flickr, and a zipped folder is downloadable here with all the images.