Went to the ice races on Saturday and took my new (used) Mamiya NC1000. The Mamiya is a compact 35mm SLR. It is not much bigger than a Canon Canonet rangefinder. It fits easily in my jacket pocket. It also has very big, bright viewfinder. I find that this is the easiest manually focused camera to use. It has a diagonal split prism that makes it easy to focus off a horizontal or vertical line. I love the size of rangefinders, but I have a difficult time getting them focused. My eyes are too old. SLRs are usually too bulky to take everywhere, but this Mamiya is very compact and lightweight.
Not only was I shooting a new camera, but I was also shooting a new film, Arista Premium 400, which is supposed to be Kodak Tri-X 400 repackaged and sold much cheaper than Kodak. I bought it from Freestyle Photo for $2.20 a roll. I shot it at 1600 asa to see if I could replace the now discontinued Fuji Neopan 1600.
And not only was I shooting a new film with a new camera, I decided to develop the film myself. Holy Cow! Talk about lot’s of opportunities for failure. Anyway, I managed to stave off disaster and ended up with real images on my film. I was pretty pleased with the way they turned out. Very gritty and vintage looking.
You can see all the pix here. I’ll have more on the Mamiya coming up.