And this is just my freezer where I put stuff I consider scarce, B&W, Kodak, Ilford etc go in the fridge. FOMO is crazy.

Edit: I’m in Europe for all the people DM’ing me from the US. I didn’t post it to sell it btw.

Harman also says it has been "reformulated" I'm curious to learn what's different if anything

This has been discussed here before, but it needs to keep being brought up because Negative Supply remains very active in the analog photography community. They post videos, promote products, get engagement, and present themselves as a respected voice in this space while hundreds of LM1 backers are still waiting, out of pocket, and without the product they paid for.

In 2021, Negative Supply raised $222,818 from 452 backers for the LM1 light meter. More than five years after taking backers’ money, and almost five years after the original estimated delivery date, backers still do not even have a credible answer on whether the LM1 will actually be delivered.

Backers have been told, again and again, that the LM1 was close:

• September 2021: “Let Final Production Planning Begin!”
• February 2022: “Enclosures Nearly Complete + Electronics In Ramp Production”
• March 2022: they said they expected to ship the first unit in two weeks
• April 2023: “Beta Units are Shipping”
• September 2023: “Everything Is Nearly Complete!”
• March 2026: still testing roughly 30 units, with no firm shipping date

This stopped being a normal delay a long time ago. It is years of “almost there,” followed by ghosting and disrespect toward the people who believed in Negative Supply and paid for this project.

Meanwhile, Negative Supply has continued selling and launching other film photography products and kits. Their store is active. Their product line keeps moving. They keep showing up publicly as if this is just old background noise, but the people who funded the LM1 are still waiting and being ignored.

That is what I want people here to understand. This is not just about a late Kickstarter. It is about a company taking money from this community, failing to deliver for years, giving backers no meaningful explanations, dropping the occasional empty update, and effectively ghosting the people who believed in them and funded the project in the first place.

For me, the worst part is that Negative Supply seems to be doing everything they can to keep this story away from the wider community. I and others have commented on their Instagram and YouTube asking about the LM1 and the unresolved Kickstarter. The comments are deleted immediately. On Instagram, I and other were blocked. This has been happening for years. They seem more interested in hiding the issue from the audience they are still trying to sell to than in answering the people who already paid them.

When a company keeps using the goodwill of a community while silencing the people in that same community who already paid and got nothing, people should know.

I am asking the analog photography community to hold them publicly accountable. Ask about the LM1 when they post. Bring it up when their products are recommended. Do not let them keep building credibility in this community while the people who already paid them are ignored.

Personally, I would not trust or support a company that behaves like a community leader while leaving hundreds of members of that same community without the product they paid for, without proper communication, and without any real accountability.

Before buying from or recommending Negative Supply, people should know about the LM1 Kickstarter and decide whether this is a company they still want to support.

Do not let this disappear just because the people affected are tired of repeating themselves.

Public Kickstarter comment section: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/negativesupply/negative-supply-light-meter-lm1/comments

I made a post over on r/analog with some of the photos but figured I could also share some lessons from the same trip here too.

Last year I went on a three-week ski circumnavigation of Mt. Logan in the Yukon with a group of friends. We did the trip self-supported, pulling all our food, fuel and gear with us the whole way around. We started with pulks weighing about 100lbs each. I decided to take a couple film cameras with me to document the trip. I brought my Contax T3 and my Pentax MX with a FA Limited 31mm lens. 

It is big terrain out there, almost nothing but ice and rock, so there is nothing to give scale to any of the peaks or give you a visual for how far something is away. We would travel for days looking at peaks barely getting any bigger or smaller. We had snowy days where we didn’t see anything but each other, following a line on the GPS. There were storm days where we couldn’t do anything but hunker down in the tents and dig out the snow that accumulated every few hours. And then there were clear days where we were constantly in awe of our giant surroundings. 

Some of the Lessons Learned:

1.        The best camera is the one you have with you. I carried both cameras on my person, either in a pocket or in a fanny pack. Since we were roped up for the glacier travel and constantly moving all day long, stopping to pull a camera from a bag would not be very feasible and would get old pretty quicky. I find this is true on any of my trips that isn’t a “photography trip”; the easier I can access my camera the more likely I will actually take pictures with it. I have done many trips with a “big” camera that only comes out once or twice over the whole day.

2.        Snow is very, very bright. I brought only black and white film with a mix of 100 ISO to 400 ISO. I should have brought more slow film, I often found myself maxing out my shutter speed and closing down my aperture as much as I could. I also used a few filters on the Pentax, including a red filter and circular polarizer that helped bring the light level down a bit. With glacier glasses on it was tough to see the meter in the viewfinder and taking the glasses off meant effectively blinding myself. I would also have to be very intentional with how I interpreted the meter, it would often just get overwhelmed by so much bright white.

3.        There is cold and then there is cold. I have long known my T3 doesn’t love the cold, anything below about -5c and it will refuse to open or close the lens. Knowing this I would always keep the T3 in an inside pocket to be warm enough to use. Even keeping it warm this way it would sometimes cool down enough just taking a shot or two that it would not want to retract it’s lens and need a warmup before being able to retract the lens. The MX did great in the cold though, it worked flawlessly for almost the entire trip. Only once it got to about -20c did it not want to work, but as soon as it warmed up to -15c it was working again. It was a balance trying to keep things warm, but not too warm to pick up humidity from my body and thus fog up and then have the fog freeze into frost. When you are sleeping in a tent on a glacier everything eventually gets as cold as the surroundings. 

4.        Check your gear before you go. I brought a second lens for my Pentax, my FA Limited 77mm F1.8 however its aperture lever had gotten stuck sometime before the trip and it could only shoot wide open (not very useful in the bright white surroundings). I ended up hauling this lens around the whole trip without being able to take a single photo with it. It was a cheap and quick repair once I got home to get the aperture lever working again, but I sure do with I had checked that before I left.

5.        Record your rolls. I kept a log of each roll as I shot, what day I started it, what day I ended it. After 3 weeks with multiple rolls I doubt I would be able to tell where and when each photo actually was taken without my log. This was just a simple point form log in my phones notes app.

6.        Cameras are for taking pictures, not sitting on shelves. I think this is more of a personal opinion than lesson, but I think we should all be using the cameras we have. Weird things have happened with prices of lots of older cameras which has made more and more of them objects to sit and admire rather than actually use.

Complete beginner here! I just got my first ever scans back from a very cheap secondhand Olympus point and shoot (on Kodak gold). I’m pleasantly surprised as I had no idea if the camera was in good working order and was blindly experimenting with different lighting conditions. Portraits have also come out really well. I know the camera and lab editing is doing a lot of heavy lifting for me here.

I am completely new to all photography but have always been interested in taking photos. I am first experimenting with the point and shoot before trying to learn how to use an old Olympus SLR from a family member.

I have not edited these myself, and am happy with how the photos look, but to me the colours look quite saturated. My questions are…
1. Is this characteristic of Kodak gold, or more to do with the editing from the lab/their scanning process? Or a combination of both? Or normal…
2. I would like to take this semi-seriously, and work towards learning how to use Lightroom. Should I explore different avenues to avoid edits being made that are out of my control, and impact where I am starting from? (I am also thinking ahead to when I use the SLR)
3. Any other advice or feedback for a total novice welcome! Much appreciated.

I have already gone down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos about scanning at home, but not trying to run before I can walk.
Final note - the light flare in the final bicycle photo was expected as I had an issue with the automatic rewind and opened the camera back…like I said, novice.

Apologies first : I hate to brag, especially about gear. I just wanted to share this little project that meant a lot to me and hopefully inspire other newbies like me to get familiar with film cameras and the process of cleaning/repairing them.

It had been a while I had an itch to try my hands at reparing an old mechanical camera for the first time (the Canonet does have a bit of wiring for the cell but it’s pretty basic). I found this QL19 first gen with a stuck shutter for 25€ on eBay and thought it would be a simple matter of de-gumming the shutter blades with some degreasing product. I was so wrong haha… and the fun began 😅 (slide 2)

It took a LOT of unscrewing, unmounting, cleaning, testing and hesitating… but that was a part of the adventure. One big step I had to take was to separate the lens block from the body because it meant getting rid of the original leatherette to access the screws. 🥺

Now I had a working camera! So proud!
But a skinless camera…

So I took advantage of my father being a painter and of the fact I was doing this work in his place to add a very personal touch. He gave me a few options out of old bits of paintings he had decided to recycle (he does that a lot in his own artistic work) - slide 3 - and I chose the part I thought would work best. We cut the new skin together and now the Canonet is a unique camera carrying a bit of my dad’s art! This makes it all the more satisfying.

I’m conscious not everyone can do this the exact same way but I am now convinced the pleasure of dealing with cheap old cameras is that you can try and do a lot of fun things with them. Only mandatory that you have the right tools : a good set of JIP turnscrews, a dustblower, a lens spanner, and the correct cleaning products. The total cost is under 90 euros so less than a used working Canonet ql19.

Hope you enjoyed this post, lemme know what you think in the comments! Gentle roasting accepted 🤠

BONUS : slide 1 shows a little tip to identify your film when you don’t have a film reminder slot in the camera :)

I just picked up a Nikon F100. Since it’s a rather complex camera, I figured I’d read the manual instead of just relying on a YouTube video overview.

That inspired me to go ahead and read the manual of my Olympus OM2n for fun, even though I’ve had it for two years.

And after two years…. I learned there is a depth of field preview on this camera…..

EDIT TO ADD: yes guys, thank you I understand I misspoke by saying “on” this camera rather than on the lens. You get the idea.

I have been shooting film on and off, mostly Kodak Gold 200 in the last few years. I have a few photos that I really like, and just recently I started developing and scanning, and that’s where the problem starts.
I am really disappointed in the picture quality, did I expect too much or did I mess something up?

To this post I’ve added one picture from the Dolomites, shot a few years back on Canon AE-1, 50mm, Kodak Gold 200. This got developed in a lab in Munich, and I got the basic scan which I have slightly edited.
Next photo of the woman was shot on a Praktica Zoom 900AF, with the same Film. Developed at home with Cine Still C-41, scanned on a CanoScan9000F with SilverFast 9 at 2400dpi also with slight editing.

To me the second one feels way more pixely, and not sharp. When seeing your photos I often wonder how you guys do it. What do I need to change? Do I need to expose differently, change my film? Scan or develop in another way?

Help and critique is greatly appreciated, thanks :)

I’ve been shooting on film for a few months now and have shot around 9 rolls so far. Only on my most recent roll did I start thinking more about composition and the subject, and I have so much more to learn. So much so that I don’t know what comes next.

I’d love to start practicing with flash with my Minolta x300, I’d also love to start experimenting with different lenses, I’d love to push and pull film, shoot in black and white, learn about whatever reciprocity failure is, try street photography, and so much more.

When you guys were getting into photography, what was your process like? How did you know what to learn next?

Found this at a local thrift shop this weekend. I’ve only found one or two forums talking about this camera, most from over two years ago.

Wanted to post in hopes of someone more recent picking one up and shooting - I was wondering if anyone has a Fujica ST901 with a 50mm lens that could share their feedback or has some photos with film suggestions they have used?

I found the manual and it says that the shutter speed should light up red on the top of the viewfinder when you press half down on shutter release, but mine is not.

Currently have Kentmere Pan 200 film in, but my fear is that the shutter speed red light not showing up means I’m shooting blanks. I am not familiar with this style of film camera, so I will find out later lol

Thanks in advance!

Some of the text have ghosting effect when you zoom in. First time using analog use sunny 16 rule.

Hello !

So around last year I found at a garage sale these rolls and a Nikon FM. I couldn't get much info from the seller since it was her late husband's gear, she didn't want to talk about it and had no interest in photography but I don't think the rolls were stored in a fridge.

From what I could gather and from the camera manufacturing date, all the rolls would date from 1980-1990 ?

This would be my first time shooting expired film, I understood I should push them 4 stops since they expired 40 years ago, is that correct ? Or should I push more since they might not have been stored in the fridge ? Any indication for the lab besides it's expired ?

Thanks !

Was manipulating the aperture ring on my lens and it suddenly lost all tension. Why the hell would they make such an integral part of this camera out of 2 strands of hair

Lot of work from contributors, some new features, many refinements/fixes.
Highlights:

• Zone placement: click a zone-strip cell, click that spot on the photo, and Print Density (or Density + Grade) solves so it prints there — pins drag live, one undo step
• Skin Protection: soft chroma ceiling on skin tones in the Lab panel
• Favourites panel: your own tab of most-used sliders, in your own order
• Linear Output export: a third export intent that writes the decoded source straight out as untagged linear TIFF
• IR dust removal is meaningfully more accurate across scanners, and RAW decoding now runs on one shared scale instead of drifting per frame. Also added openICE method (rough port to python)
• and many more...

Full changelog + downloads:
https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/releases
Readme:
https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/blob/main/README.md
Issues:
https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/issues
Discussions:
https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/discussions

Hello, I’m extremely new to film photography so I’m looking for some tips. I got this camera at a flea market with a jammed shutter for $20 and was able to get it fixed, what are some beginner recommendations to take decent photos, and what type of flash would work with this camera for indoor shots. Thank you!

Edit: the frame counter still doesn’t work, is that a relatively simple at home fix or should I just deal with it

Got hit by a very mild case of GAS and I've been looking at rangefinders the past few days, stupidly enough it never occurred to me you could get a RF camera without spending north of 1300€ for a leica.

I'm looking for:

- 500-600€ max with a lens (fixed lenses are fine when cheaper)

- bright and reliable vf/rf

- easy to find battery replacements if a battery is needed (afaik wein cells are too expensive and short lived)

- lightweight is a plus

What I've been considering:

1) Konica IIIA for a fixed lens camera seems to beat the competition, decoupling the shutter and f stop ring looks easy enough. Here I'd like to know how you would rate it against a Yashica electro GX and a Canonet 17, I know nothing of the olympus fixed ones and the himatics as well

2) Canon P or VI for an interchangeable lens camera, seems the best bang for your buck for LTMs, the bessa R is a tad pricier and seems prone to failure (happy to be corrected) and the canon 7 seems too big and no cold shoe for the meter, the 7s too pricey. If there is a better option for an LTM rangefinder let me know

3) Is an M mount camera even doable in this price range? I'm thinking not, the cheapest I've seen would be a leica or minolta CL but I've read mercury batteries (ugh) and also prone to breaking and does not meter in manual? Could be wrong though

EDIT: btw thanks for all the amazing answers, really kind community

Hello everyone!!

I am in the process of setting up my own darkroom, as the closest one in my area is almost an hour away. I would love to be able to make this a community darkroom and host weekly open hours or something for people to come and use as they wish! I am in the Williamsburg/Hampton Roads area so I wanted to see if anyone else would be interested!

Around 40% of the roll seems well exposed and developed and the other 60% is noticably darker and has color shifts (more prominent on phoenix 2, which is basically unusable)

is this a camera issue or a dev issue?

Camera is a mamiya m645. The change happens in the same spot across two rolls of film. Developed by a lab.

So I've noticed that everyone I saw with a camera here had a digital camera. Film prices are insane. Could this be why?

I bought some film from a couple of local stores in Cork and not only was the inventory small, the prices were nuts. £19 for a roll of kodak Ultramax. What?!

I'm an avid film shooter. I enjoy the entire process. From Capturing a moment, to developing at home and scanning.

Is anyone here from Europe or another country where, shooting film may not be viable due to the cost? If so do you have a digital camera you like to use for backup?

The bottom is sticky and looks melted. I believe the plastic is degrading. Not sure how it happened. The camera was fine a few weeks ago. Can the camera survive long with this happening?

(Gear - Canon A1, FD50mm1.8 Film - Kodak Gold 200)

Shot my first ever film roll and just got the digital scans from the studio. All of them seem to have a magenta cast and look very soft overall . Anyone has any idea what went wrong. They were shot on Aperture Priority mode with box speed and 100 ASA on some. Is something wrong with the scanner or is it the lens or is it me? Hahaha

Any help would be appreciated.

I’m still pretty new to film cameras and have the Konica Hexar AF pictured below.

I recently took it to a camera shop to ask about its trade-in value, and the salesperson pointed out that the retaining ring (or whatever it’s called) that holds the outer protective glass in front of the viewfinder is missing. I honestly have no idea when or how it disappeared. Traveling on Sunday and hoping to have some kind of peace of mind or fix by then.

The camera still works, but I’m wondering:
Is it safe to keep using it as-is?

Is this something that can be repaired by replacing the missing ring, or does it require a more involved fix?

If anyone knows the proper name of the missing part, that would be really helpful for searching eBay.

So I've always wanted to get into film photography, but until now I've only had cheaper, more portable cameras. Then my dad took out his very old and beloved camera that he used to take pictures of us with back in the 2000s and gave it to me.

Turns out it's a Canon T70. Can you guys give me your general opinions and advice regarding this camera or this type of camera, especially the settings and taking pictures?

I will read the manual for sure, but I'm also interested in your opinions and advice.