Woodlake’s Lake
Woodlake’s Lake is a scenic little spot that sits in a residential neighborhood only 2 minutes from my house. Two Sundays ago, it was a beautiful morning with spring having just begun to bloom in spectacular fashion. As it happened, I had recently acquired two new (well… old) cameras whose shutters I hadn’t yet released.
One was a Konica-Minolta Dynax 7D DSLR and the other was an Olympus OM-2n 35mm film camera. There’s a story behind both cameras and why I had picked them up, but this isn’t a blog post about my equipment (spoiler: it’s about the morning I enjoyed shooting and the photos I ended up with) so I’ll not go into detail here. I’ll put up gear reviews in the not-so-distant future as I cover all my cameras, lenses, and other sundry photography equipment. For now, here’s a glamour shot of these two lovelies.
Woodlake’s Lake is a mouthful and I had to confirm with Google Maps that that’s what its actual name is. Woodlake happens to be the ritzy neighborhood that surrounds it. Despite the awkward and self-referential name, the lake itself is a beautiful little spot, bounded on one side by a busy thoroughfare and on the other by lovely, well-to-do homes and tall, multi-colored trees. Winding its way around the entire lake is a pleasant, paved trail frequented by casual strollers, dog walkers, and runners, most of who live in the neighborhood or the surrounding area.
One of my sons and I have taken a few runs around the lake in the past and I always thought it would be a great place to do some photography once I picked up the hobby again.
So I woke up on this particularly beautiful Sunday morning with a hankering to shoot some photos and the knowledge that there was this pretty little lake just a couple of minutes away.
Shooting with the Konica-Minolta Dynax 7D
I know I said this blog post is about the photos and not the equipment, but for some context, the Dynax 7D is a digital camera that came out in 2004 and boasts a whopping 6 megapixels (easily beat by most budget phones today… and handily clobbered by the elite smartphones like the Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy). Despite its dearth of megapixels, Konica-Minolta’s first and last foray into DSLRs before going out of business in 2006 was a technical marvel for its day and still boasts some of the best ergonomics and features of any cameras that have come out since. This is all to say… I had a blast shooting with it. Here are some photos that I took with it that morning. These are all what came out of the camera with some very subtle editing in Lightroom.
Shooting with the Olympus OM-2n
I love this camera and was so happy to find a copy online that was described to be in excellent shape. I love how it looks and I love how it feels in my hands. But I’m not entirely sure I love how it shoots quite yet. As with any equipment you get from eBay, especially a camera from 1984, it’s always going to be a crapshoot as to whether there’s something wrong with it that wasn’t mentioned in the description.
When I received this camera in the mail, it came in a ratty old camera bag along with some filters, lens cleaning papers, and surprise, surprise… 3 rolls of very expired Kodak Gold 200. I didn’t have a clue as to how old this film was as the rolls didn’t come in their original boxes (where the expiration date is normally stamped). So I looked up images of old film cannisters on Google and from what I can tell, they appears to be from the early 2000s. So that would put them from around 16 to 21 years old. They would have certainly expired back in the ought’s.
The camera itself appeared to be in the promised excellent shape. A little dusty but otherwise unmarked and with everything apparently functioning properly.
I looked at the film. I looked at the camera. Finally, I figured, “What the heck?” After all, expired film is quite trendy and sought after nowadays, even film as old as 20 years. The rule is to overexpose it by setting a lower ISO to make up for the loss of light sensitivity. If you do that, it should work out and you might get some interesting results.
But there was a gotcha. If the pictures came out looking really odd, I wouldn’t be sure whether it was due to the film or the camera. Still, I was curious to see what I was going to get.
The result, for now, is a mixed bag. Some of the shots came out with weird light streaking. I’m not sure if that was caused by the expired film, a light leak in the camera chamber, or because I was shooting into the sun. However, some other shots came out beautifully, with saturated colors, high contrast, and an interesting grain texture. Software engineers work hard to reproduce this kind of look in Instagram filters and all I had to do was use some expired film!
Here are some of the better shots I got with the paleolithic film and the close to 40-year-old Olympus.
