Fifteen Years On

 At previous points in the life of this blog coiniciding with the anniversary of its first post, I've used the occasion to take stock of the landscape of film based photography. The last such post, Ten Years On was more a reflection on trying to use the camera from that very first post–the Olympus Pen EE3–through the first year of hte pandemic only for it to develop a fault and the quality of the resulting photographs suffereing as a result. I haven't posted very much in recent years, partly to circumstances in life, wokring on the PhD which I finished in 2024, and for work and financial reasons simply taking fewer photographs than I had done habitually in the first ten years of this blog. Interesting things had been happening in film photography during the last five years, Harman producing a colour film, the expansion of Kentmere films into 120 format with a new speed point in the 200 ISO film; Orwo also brought out a colour film and a new 100 ISO black and white emulsion; Foma produced an ortho film in 35mm and 16mm, and black and white negative ciné films to augment their long-established R100 film; Ferrania also produced an ortho film (colour film of all types continued to get more expensive, of course). I haven't had the opportunity to actively explore these new films, whihc previously would have been ideal subjects for this blog–they still are, but without the novelty of trying them out when new, as I had done with a few films in the past. These often provided the most popular of the posts on this blog. On that, I thought it mght be worth sharing some statistics for this blog over its lifetime. The screenshot below shows the ten most visited posts over the fifteen years.

Of the film posts, Rollei RPX 25 and Foma Retropan 320 Soft were truly new when I wrote about them; Rollei RPX 400 (with its 100-speed version) was also relatively new and becoming more available in the UK. Fomapan 400 by contrast had been around for many years, and I'd used it in medium format a lot more than 35mm before I wrote the post; Ilford Pan 100 was not generally available in the UK, and I was told that it was being discontinued in favour of Kentmere Pan 100, similarly to the Ilford Pan 400/Kentmere Pan 400 (I suspected the addition of 'Pan' into the Kentmere name also seemed to be a deliberate decision to position these films as replacements). It's also instructive to see the camera posts which are the most popular: the post on the Canon AV-1 is in itself not very detailed about using the camera, but this does seem to have been useful for quite a number of visitors, and, I surmise, the fix for the camera being jammed that I walk through would seem to be a common problem (the procedure I used for the fix was based on one for the AE-1, similar, but different enough that it was worth properly documenting). The subminiature Rollei 16 camera does not seem to have much specific information about its use online, which probably accounts for the place of that in the list–the presence of the MPP is no doubt similar. For this small corner of the internet, and for what I have tried to do with this blog, is to give a full account of the cameras I have written about in use–as well as researching, I generally like to devote some time with any camera to get to know it before I write; the posts about different films are largely the same. At the time I began this blog, although I had always used film, I had returned to developing again after a few years of not doing so, and began to take this seriously as a process: as much as anything, this blog was a place to record whatever I was discovering for myself, and useful as a reference: and, if I was doing so, it seemed worthwhile to share my research and discoveries.