I’ve been shooting Project 365’s for 8 years, taking one photo a day, and for 2023 I wanted to shake things up and attempt something new. I challenged myself to shoot my P365 only on a film camera. I shoot with a Canon Ae-1. My roll for January was a Fuji 400 Superia Xtra. I should have looked for film with a higher ISO, the winter months are dark, but I’m still learning and overall I really like the images I was able to get. There are many out of focus images, slow shutter and my shaky hands don’t mix, but that’s part of the learning process and having fun and experimenting.
I’m really excited to learn more about film photography, try different types of film stock, and test out some of the vintage film cameras that I’ve picked up thrifting to see if they even work.
When I first loaded my film into my camera for January 1st, I didn’t exactly put it in correctly and for the first 4 days I thought I was taking pictures but I actually wasn’t haha. I fixed my film, loaded it the right way and started the month over again. The Fuji 400 had 36 exposures, when I got my scans back there were 35, so I only skipped one shot which was probably because of my loading the film incorrectly when I started, but my Ae-1 has been known to skip frames here and there. Because I know my camera skips frames sometimes, I decided that for each month I will finish off each roll of 36 frames, taking extra frames when inspiration strikes.
Have you ever shot on film? What was your favourite? If you have any tips or tricks, throw them my way because I want to learn all the things I can.
Here’s our January on film.
