Nikonos II, March 2010 on Flickr

Ever since I took that cameraphone photo of the kid protesters, in which their signs are rendered completely illegible by the shittiness of said cameraphone, I’ve been more srsly wanting to get a film camera — despite having never used a nice one. I spent a couple of bored mornings looking at Leicas on Craigslist before Emily pointed out that we never actually sold the cameras that came with my dad’s stuff two years ago. We dug them out and spent a thrillingly nerdy evening on the internet looking at blotchy pdf scans of instruction manuals.

This morning we went to the camera store, got a quickie cleaning and lesson and some canisters of film, and headed into the world. We went to the cemetery because we’re goth.

These were all shot with the camera I was using, the 1968 Nikon Nikonos II. It’s waterproof and weighs about half a payphone, and was apparently the must-have surf camera back in the day. It comes apart by taking off the lens (which has f-stop and focal distance numbers in helpful large print right on its face), and then popping the whole top off and the guts with it. It even managed to forgive me, mostly, for popping out the finished roll after not actually rewinding any of it. And these pictures look great! Much better than my LG Rumor (if you can imagine such a thing).

The roll Emily shot with the 70-year-old Argus A “didn’t turn out,” according to Walgreen’s. Mysterious! But it’s a mysterious camera, very tight-lipped about its working process, and for some reason we didn’t take the negatives anyway to examine for clues. Further experimentation is merited. There was also a gigantic accordion-style Polaroid that stayed in the bag. God only knows what kind of film that huge fucker takes.

My dad was a professional photojournalist for many years. In my adult life, I’ve felt myself to be something of a terrible photographer, and have sought to come to terms with my sullying of his legacy in such a manner (i.e. the manner of failing to genetically inherit his B.A.). He’s still around, so I don’t know why I feel responsible for his legacy in the first place, but you know. Today’s trek into film photography was thusly pretty great because it was A. fun and B. such a challenging crapshoot to get a photograph, period, that any moanings for ‘good’ photographs were cheerily rescheduled to a later and still-hypothetical skill level.