...And here I am.

I have been quiet of late with the film. Partly because it was somewhat disheartening to go from 80c per scan from 120 to $3.50, which means using medium format is now so prohibitively expensive that I may as well give up on it. Or I could just fork out for a scanner of my own.

Last week, I enrolled in the local university's summer school program, undertaking the decoratively-titled "Dialogues in Black & White". It's a 10 day course in January on B&W film photography. This includes access to the university's wet darkroom. Nice.

In preparation, I am going to order myself a Holga GFN (aka 'Woca') and a bunch of film.

I'm excited.

Velvia? No thanks.

When we finally booked our honeymoon to NZ, I went a bit nuts with the idea of taking the Minolta on a bit of a trip. I'd always regretted not taking it to Europe in 2007, so I was determined to make this a good'un.

So I stocked up on film: 10 x Reala, 2 x Velvia 100, 2 x Kodak slide film (not used).

After quite a while of waiting, I finally got the Velvia developed. Results above. The thing holding me back was that it was going to cost a lot of money to have them developed & scanned (about $42 each film done locally). SO thanks to a reasonably favourable return from Mr Swan, I finally got them done.

And I found out that I don't much like Velvia. It's okay, but not something I'll be using again. Feels a bit...er...over saturated. Silly thing to notice about Velvia, I know. But I just don't much like the feel of it. Over saturated & very cold (the examples above don't relfect this well, as all those scenes were fairly cold anyways).

Another learning experience. I'll stick to Fuji & Ilford print film in future.