Frugal Film Project – Rolando Bravo

I am 31 years old living in Oklahoma. In 2015 I received an used DSLR for my Birthday, my very first camera ever. I took my camera everywhere and took pictures of everything and everyone (just family though because I could never do street photography, it really scared me to get confronted by a random person on the street.)

A year later after having taken so many pictures, my laptop and camera got stolen on a parking lot in Houston Texas. I didn’t really care so much about loosing my laptop and camera because those were replaceable but my digital files were lost forever, I did not have anything backed up anywhere else.

A month or two later I started searching for a new camera and in the process found out about a place that offered Film Photography and Darkroom classes. Took a black and white phorography class that covered everything from shooting your film, developing it, making prints and matting it on a frame, all in a 6 week timeframe. That is when I realized that it was probably the best medium to preserve my pictures in negatives and prints, well I have never heard of someone getting their film negatives stolen.

MY GEAR

35 mm Zeiss Ikon Contessa rangefinder

45mm f2.8 lens with leafshutter

Purchased for 30 dollars at a local pawnshop

Vivitar 283 flash with hotshoe to pc adapter and small plastic tripod purchased for 12 dollars

Will be using my iphone with Pocket Light Meter App for metering

And the vivitar flash has a small range of ISO to Aperture to Distance chart, have never used it before like that so it should be interesting

Film

Localy sourced from Apertures Photo in Tulsa oklahoma, its also the place where I took my darkroom classes and my go-to place for darkrom chemicals

Will  have Apertures Photo develop it for me

Fuji Superia 400 is about $5 dollar a roll

C41 processing is $7.50 a roll

SCANNING

My local library has an Epson V550 that can be used for scanning film for free and included in their computer is Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop

You can find Rolando on Instagram: rolando_bravo87