First Time Using 35 mm Analog Camera in UK and Morocco

If you might know, I’ve been using a mirrorless camera for taking photos in all of my social media accounts. I’ve been spoiled by how simple and light the mirrorless camera is, and of course with amazing detail and result. A week before I departed, my boyfriend has just bought an analog camera from Japan. It’s the canon FT QL 35mm SLR created in 1966. Yes it’s such a great great grandmother SLR camera, but it still looks pretty and works very well. He bought 3 lenses, but the one that I used was only the 50 mm f1.8. The camera’s weight is 0.7 kg, yes a little bit heavy for travel camera.

I asked my boyfriend to lend me his baby for a month traveling around UK and Morocco, because I honestly was curious about the manual camera and somehow it challenged me. It needs time for me to get used to it because the setting is manual and there is no preview. It needs feeling to shoot the object. It’s actually not that difficult to operate the analog camera if we know about the settings.

1. Buy The Roll Film
Since it’s analog camera, so the camera needs roll film to shoot. One roll film contains of 36 shots which would be developed into photos when the roll film finish. There are some type of roll film you can buy such as : Agfa Vista, Kodak Color Plus, Fujicolor, Ilford, Rollei. The prices are around 50.000 rupiah to 200.000 rupiah and you can buy in Tokopedia or any e-commerce. The type of the roll film also influences the color of the photos. My personal favorite is Agva Vista 400.

2. Choose the ISO/ASA
The iso is included on the rollfilm which means we have to choose at the first the iso that we are going to use. The iso starts at 100 to 1600, usually for daytime, I use iso 400 or iso 800, and if I want to shoot at night, I usually buy iso 1600.

3. Set the F and shutter speed.
Once I choose the iso at 400, I need to manage the balance settings between the diafragma (F) and the shutter speed. For almost the photos that I took below, they were taken on F 1.8 and shutter speed 500 or 1000.

4. Manual Focus
Say goodbye to automatic focus, because again you need to use your feeling to set the focus. The manual focus needs the photographer to be more concentrate when shooting.

5. No Preview, The rollfilm needs to be developed
Yes this is the special things about using analog camera, there is no preview and the result would be surprising. We’re not going to know whether the result would be fine or not because it needs time to finally see them. And we are not going to know whether we need to retake or not, because we can’t see the preview. But they are always ended up surprising, i sometimes even dont remember what i’ve shot haha

6. Place to develop the roll film into photos
One film camera (36 shots) cost 65.000 rupiah to be developed into photos. I developed the rollfilm in Soup and Film where located at STC, Senayan Jakarta. This is the most recommended one to develop the roll film. Otherwise, if you guys know other good place to develop roll film in Jakarta or Bali, please kindly share with me the name of the place.

Those are things that I needed to adapt when using the SLR Canon FT QL. The special thing about using analog camera is, it will be a “surprise” until they are being developed into photos. The photos that I share here were taken with 35mm SLR Canon FT QL with film Agfa Vista iso 400 and the black and white with Rollei rpx Iso 400.

The color of the result are original, no filter and no edit. I’ve been such a long time being a fans of film camera photo tone color. For digital photos, i usually edit them with VSCO cam to get the film camera filter effect, but these are the real ones, i dont need to filter them anymore ! I still have couple of photos that taken with analog film camera i want to share, on the next post 😀

cheers,

Kadek Arini

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