Film Number 35

Film Number 35

In May 2021 I shot of roll of expired black and white film on an old Pentax 35mm compact camera. It was the first roll of analogue film that I'd used for around 18 years!

Like many others, I moved into digital photography in the early 2000s and loved the freedom of being able to shoot as many frames as I liked and then have instant access to the files, editing them in Photoshop instead of the darkroom. Moving to digital really opened up photography for me and allowed me to embark on personal projects, such as the District Line walk.

However, since that initial, experimental roll back in 2021, I have rediscovered my love for film photography. I got my two 35-year old Nikon FE2s out of the cupboard and had them beautifully restored by Black on White Cameras in Bristol. I began to buy film rather than rely on my stock of very old expired rolls and started shooting colour negative, which I'd never really been a huge fan of before. The results were good.

My Nikon cameras are lovely, but they are also big and heavy to carry - especially as an everyday camera. So with that in mind, I looked for compact film point-and-shoot cameras and came across the Yashica T5 - a nineties compact with a super-sharp Carl Zeiss Tessar 35mm lens. I found one on eBay and it was pretty much exactly what I wanted. Small and portable, with great image quality.

The pictures on this page are all from a single roll of film - Ilford Delta 100 - taken over the summer of 2023 on the aforementioned Yashica compact. The images span four months from the end of June when we visited Frome for the Photo Festival, to the Dean Lane Skate Park in Bedminster at the end of September.