u/walt-and-co

I’m quite happy with this photo, which was taken on Ilford HP5 Plus monochrome film with a Minolta SRT-101 and a 75-200mm telephoto lens.

The weather is warming up, and the flowers were in bloom, so I headed out with my three fumos and my trusty camera to take some snapshots. Conveniently, there were both red and purple flowers in the park near my home, so I tried to match them to the two Reimus.

For this batch, I had a roll of much nicer (and more expensive) film than usual, and so the colours are very bright and saturated. I’m not sure if I love the effect, but it was fun to experiment for sure!

An old woman who lives near me also saw me taking these photos and told me that the fumos were ‘very cute’, so that was a nice interaction too.

Camera: Yashica FX-3

Film: Kodak Portra 800

Just before the end of the cherry blossom season, I went out at night to experiment with some night photography (taking photos of fumos, of course). This presents a new set of challenges, as it’s difficult to get enough light onto the film to properly expose it. The best way to achieve that is by slowing down the shutter speed, taking in light for longer - but even the slightest movement can throw the shot off and leave it smudged and blurry. I solved that as best I could by using a tripod and a cable shutter release, which meant I didn’t have to touch the camera at all to take the pictures.

The next challenge is that it’s difficult to choose your camera settings correctly - with the long exposure times, you don’t get much margin for error at all, and it’s easy to accidentally overexpose and blind out all the detail, as I did to Reimu in image 2. Still, it was good fun and a good learning experience! I also got two shots I’m happy with, and sometimes on film that’s two more than you can expect….

Shot on a Yashica FX-3 with Fujifilm 400 film. I also tried using my Mamiya Sekkor 500DTL, but the slow shutter mechanism failed catastrophically (you can see that in the last two shots).