04. Brighton Old Pier
10th October 2022
BRIGHTON OLD PIER
A camera test on the beach
In the late month of October were the cold breeze of winter shows its first signs of settling in, Brighton seafront turns into a beautiful and colourful sight when the sun sets on the ocean horizon. I picked up a second hand 35mm film camera from Facebook marketplace a week piror and I needed to give it a test run to see how it performs. So I picked up a roll of film and headed down to Brighton old pier at sunset and fired away.
The camera I picked up was the Canon AE-1, a work horse in the 70’s & 80’s, very popular in it’s time and still is today. I heard good things about this camera and I felt that it was time for me to experience it and appreciate the process. I’d shot film before, but not on a fully manual film camera of this age and when I picked it up, it showed some signs of wear and tear. The film winder was a little loose, it sounded like it had a cough when you pressed the shutter button and I couldn’t be sure if the internal light meter worked. This little guy was 50 years old and defiantly had some character. With film photography you can’t see the photos you just taken. You have to go to a film lab and have the images developed and scanned digitally, so you don’t really know if what you’ve taken is any good. You have to trust yourself or the light meter if it works well.
A little tip that has really helped me in photography, is take a pocket notebook with you and wright down as much information as you can. Write down the film stock you used, the lighting environment that you were in and most importantly the settings you used on each photo you took. I do this so when you get your photos back from the film lab you can look at them with the notes you wrote down and see what worked and what didn’t. Ultimately you’ll learn quickly and you won’t be afraid to experiment in the future.
I walked down to the seafront with my partner Robin, just at the right time for sunset. I loaded up a roll of Kodak Colour plus (which is a great inexpensive film stock) and started to shoot away. It was cold, I had quite some layers on but the colours of the evening sun where beautiful as always. We stayed until the sun tucked itself behind the horizon, skimmed stones in-between taking photos and admiring the evening. I shot 12 photos that evening and was a little sceptical on how they would turn out. A week later I got the photos back from Colourstream, which is my local film lab in Brighton, and I was pretty pleased with results. It can be nerve racking when you see that email pop in saying your images are ready for download. Your heart races a little and the thoughts run through your mind, especially if it’s the first test roll of photos from a 50 year old camera. Were they in focus? Did I have the right settings? Will they be blank? Does this camera even work? well as you can see the camera did work and they came out exactly how imagined them to be. Of course they’ll be mistakes, but that’s how we learn, you just have to trust yourself and enjoy the process.
