💻 Have you ever felt stuck? Seth Godin explains why it’s reasonable that we feel that way sometimes. His suggestion for how to get unstuck is unreasonable, however. ReadBeing stuck is reasonable
Olympus XA2, Ultrafine Xtreme 100, 2019.
💻 We treat each other better now than at any time in history. Our better nature is better than it used to be. So says N. S. Palmer, who reminds us that it is still our daily choice to treat each other well that matters. Read What’s Your Choice?
A great joy of film photography is the community of people who enjoy everything about it: the gear, the films, getting out and shooting, and looking at the resulting photographs. Lots of us share our adventures on our blogs.
A portrait of the blogger
I’m going to list all of the photo blogs I follow. If you don’t see your blog here, I hope you won’t feel put out. Maybe I just don’t know about it. Let me know which blogs I’m missing in the comments!
This year I’m just going to list the blogs alphabetically. When you see ✨ next to a blog, it’s new to this year’s list. When you see ❤ next to a blog, it’s one I look forward to most. When you see 📷 next to a blog, its author or owner is a member of a little kaffeeklatsch I belong to where we talk about photography and photo blogging — and share each others’ posts around the Internet.
Also, this year I’m limiting the list to blogs that have posted recently and post regularly.
35 millimetre — Film photographs by Charlotte Davis in the UK.
✨ 35mm Chronicle — The fellow who writes this blog never shares his name, but he does some lovely work in black and white.
❤ 📷 Camera Go Camera — Peggy reviews lots and lots of gear, some of it off-the-wall stuff she bought while living in Japan.
Camera Legend — Sam collects legendary cameras and writes about using them.
Canny Cameras — Gear reviews and photographs by Alan D. This site explained why the Lomography 110 film I use sometimes leaves light spots on some images. A tip of the hat for that.
📷 Casual Photophile — This site written by James and his crew sets the Internet standard for vintage gear reviews. Excellent writing, excellent images, great cameras. I read every post, from beginning to end.
coronet66 — Photos from lots of great film gear from this UK blogger.
Curating Cuteness — Katie shoots film with a small stable of cameras.
📷 EMULSIVE — A place for film photographers of all backgrounds to share their knowledge, experience, and thoughts about everything related to film photography.
Field Photographer — A group blog about gear and adventure with that gear.
North East Liberties — Michael shares scenes from the region of Northern Ireland his blog is named after. His specialty is printing.
Olli Thomson Photography — A career ex-pat who lives all over the world, shooting his film gear and sharing his work.
✨ Photo A Day — Daily film photos shared more or less weekly.
Photo-Analogue – Nicholas shares photos from his 20 film cameras and discusses tech and technique.
Photo Jottings — A lot of film camera tests and reviews.
❤ Photography and Vintage Cameras – Mike does great work with his old cameras, especially in black and white. He can make an old folder or box camera really sing.
✨ 📷 Photo Thinking — Theo Panagopolous writes a friendly and informative blog on photography, photo processes and the wonderful and varied cameras used to create pictures.
Physical Grain — Personal essays, illustrated with film photographs by the authors.
Random Camera Blog – Mark shoots frequently with his old cameras and shares the results here.
reCap — Gear and photographs. A German blog in English.
It’s an odd duck, this German Kodak 35mm SLR from the mid 1960s. And it wasn’t fully functioning when I received it. But this Kodak Retina Reflex IV gave me some lovely images. See my updated review here.
Another camera review I refreshed recently was of my Minolta X-700. I shot just two rolls with it before it succumbed to the common but dreaded Stuck Winder Problem. A certain capacitor fails, and the X-700 becomes a brick.
Brick.
That second roll (it was Fujicolor 200) was shot primarily on a road trip along Indiana’s National Road from Indianapolis to the Illinois state line. My goodness but do I miss taking to the old roads. I’ve made not a single road trip this year. Life just has presented higher priorities. I hope for next year.
It felt great, however, to look through these photos from my trip ten years ago and remember a great day alone on this old highway. You might know it as US 40. First, here’s an abandoned bridge just west of Plainfield. It carried US 40 from probably about 1925 until the road was rebuilt as a four-lane divided highway in about 1940. Two new bridges were built just to the south — I stood on one of them to make this photograph — and this one was left behind to molder.
Here’s another view. You can park on a clearing just east of this bridge and walk out onto it.
Just before the four-lane highway reaches Putnamville, a short older alignment branches off. This 1923 bridge is on it, and you can still drive across it.
The bridge feels narrow, and the railing feels heavy.
Near Reelsville you’ll find an old alignment of the road that never got paved.
For a long time I thought this was the National Road’s original alignment. But I learned that the National Road was moved to this alignment in 1875 when a bridge on the original alignment, to the south, washed out and was not replaced. Read about the history of these alignments here.
Near here I stopped to photograph some roadside flowers.
When I made it to Terre Haute, I walked along the road for several blocks downtown. It’s known as Wabash Avenue here. This is the entrance to Hulman and Company, which for many years made Clabber Girl Baking Powder.
This building may once have housed the Terre Haute Trust Company, but for as long as I can remember — since I moved to Terre Haute in 1985 — it has housed the Merchant’s National Bank and, after a merger, the Old National Bank.
I drove from there all the way to the end of the Indiana portion of the road. Then I turned around and went back to Terre Haute to catch dinner at the Saratoga, a longtime restaurant right on the road.
It was a great day, and my Minolta X-700 helped me capture it — before it failed.
If you’d like to see more from this trip, via my digital camera, check it out on my old site, here.
I recently updated my 2012 review of the Pentax K1000; see it here. On my first ever roll in that camera I walked through the parking lot at work, photographing colorful everyday cars up close. I’ve always thought these photos were fun. A couple of these have been only on my hard drive all these years.
Over at Curbside Classic, the old-car blog to which I sometimes contribute, someone will occasionally post a parking-lot photo from 30 or 50 years ago. It’s always great fun to see the everyday cars of the era. The cars that get saved or restored tend to be the more noteworthy or upper-trim models.
These photographs are far too close up to ever provide much of that feeling of nostalgia. But even seven years later, when was the last time you saw a Dodge Neon R/T (above)? Even the once-ubiquitous Chevy Malibu Maxx (below) is starting to be thin on the ground.
Cars date photographs. I follow a group on Facebook for vintage photographs of Indiana. The posters are often left to guess when photos were made. Because I have good knowledge of American automobiles after World War II, I can frequently help narrow it down. “That had to be made no earlier than 1968 because there’s a 1968 Chevy in the photo.”
I made all of these photos with my 50mm f/2 SMC Pentax-M lens on Fujicolor 200.
It’s easy to make detail photos of old cars; there are so many details. I find newer cars to be more challenging. Revisiting these seven-year-old photographs makes me want to try more often now.
This Sears KS-2 was made by Ricoh and used Pentax’s K lens mount. It might not look like much, but it’s a competent and capable SLR. My updated review is here.
