Australian Adventures in Analogue

35mm photograph of a beach on an overcast day in port Phillip, Australia.

As some of you may know, Lauren and I went to Australia at Christmas to spend my first ever warm Christmas with the Australian fam. What you may not know though, is that I was very kindly gifted a mint condition, 37 year old analogue 35mm film camera by Lauren’s mum when we arrived. In quite a cool full circle moment, the camera was originally bought by Lauren’s dad before she was born to take pictures of her as a baby and at some point got resigned to the store room. Fast forward 37 years and it’s been given to me, who will use it almost exclusively to take photos of Lauren. As I say… full circle.

Now as a disclaimer, I have never used an analogue SLR camera. I had to look up how to load film, how to expose photos, heck even how to focus. For this reason if you’re expecting arty, well taken photos, you may be in the wrong place. This is the first two rolls of film I took with this camera and I was totally getting to grips with it while documenting the trip, so they are very much holiday snaps. However, I thought people may want to see what we got up to in all it’s grainy analogue glory, so here we go:

35mm photograph of a beach in Dalmeny, New South Wales, Australia

35mm photograph of a woman with brown hair wearing a blue shirt smiling as someone off camera.

35mm photograph of a black dog standing on a hard wood floor looking up at the photographer

35mm photograph of a couple smiling at the camera in a brewery with the word ‘beer’ written in large lights behind them.

35mm photograph of a man in a pink polo shirt in a brewery smiling at someone off camera.

35mm photograph of a black dog on some grey decking looking up at the photographer.

35mm photograph of a woman with dark hair and pink ribbons on her shirt smiling at the photographer.

35mm photograph of a woman and her grown up nephew on a beach smiling at the camera.

35mm photograph of young girl at a table in her living room playing a game with a woman opposite her with her back to the camera

35mm photograph of four people raising their drinks and smiling the photographer.

35mm photograph of a man in a blue shirt and a woman with dark hair in pub with pints in front of them smiling at the photographer.

35mm photograph of a woman and her mother sitting on a deck doing some watercolour painting with each other.

35mm photograph of the Melbourne skyline through a chain link fence on a sunny day.

35mm photograph of a young girl with red hair watching a street performer in Melbourne, Australia

35mm photograph of a woman with white hair on a boat smiling at someone off camera.

35mm photograph of a woman with dark hair and a dark dress on next to a railway track at Flinder’s street station, Melbourne.

35mm photograph on a man on a boat holding a beer and laughing at something off camera.

35mm photograph of a laughing woman holding up a mirror to show someone off camera in a brewery in Sydney, Australia.

35mm photograph of a red glowing satanic looking symbol in a dark bar in Melbourne, Australia.

35mm photograph of a group of young people walking down the street on a pub crawl in Sydney, Australia.

35mm photograph of a woman with dark hair wearing sunglasses and a dark dress on a boat in Melbourne, Australia

35mm photograph of a couple smiling at the camera on a rooftop in Sydney, Australia

35mm photograph of a red haired Brittany Spaniel looking out over some bushes in the Australian bush.

35mm photograph of the Melbourne skyline on a Sunny Day

Now make no mistake; anyone that has ever talked to me about photos, cameras or photography will know that this is pretty much a 180 degree turnaround. In fact since getting this camera I’ve even had friends screenshot old messages from me saying that analogue cameras were obsolete, unnecessary and anything you could do with an analogue camera could be replicated with a digital one. All I can say is… I was wrong. I absolutely love how these have come out, and could not have done it on my digital.

I still don’t think I would have ever been interested if one hadn’t fallen into my lap like this (which is a really great twist of fate) and there’s still a lot of things I don’t like about this camera. My biggest gripe is that you need to bring it up to your eye to see what you’re shooting, read the light meter and focus. This takes away any opportunity to shoot from the hip, which I’d say about 70% of my photos of people are. It sounds creepy (maybe it is?) but I think portrait shots are so much better when the subject has no idea there’s being a photo taken, as they’re actually just acting how they would and there’s a lot more scope for natural, beautiful moments between friends and family to be captured. However, I’ve found with this that the second you bring a camera up to your face people start posing and doing that weird forced smile that we all seem to do whenever we know we’re having our photo taken, which I do feel takes a lot of the actual spontaneity out of the photos. Also very unsurprisingly given it’s nearly 40 years old this camera is disastrous in low light (again, where I take a lot of my photos) but I’m hoping with some different film and lens choices down the line I can slightly sort this issue out.

But these don’t detract too much from the upsides. Namely, knowing you only have 36 photos so really making each one count as opposed to taking 1000 shots a day and never doing anything with about 95% of them. Plus of course the true sense of excitement you feel when you’re waiting to get the photos back which is something I don’t think I’ve ever even come close to in the digital realm. And of course… that grain! The thing that numerous instagram filters and Lightroom presets are trying to imitate but can never really compare to is just right there on every shot.

Double Exposure 35mm photograph of a fishtank in a Chinese restaurant super imposed with a smiling dark haired woman wearing sunglasses.

My absolute favourite part of this whole process was learning about double exposures. I’d kind of heard of these through weird photoshop tutorials in the past but didn’t really know what they were or why I’d want to do them. However at the end of the YouTube tutorial I watched to learn how to use the camera (because obviously that’s how everyone learns how to do everything nowadays) the guy mentioned this fairly advanced technique called double exposures which, even though I didn’t even know how to take a single photo on the thing yet, I knew I’d be trying out before long. For those who don’t know, they are basically two photos in one photo. You take a shot of something, then without winding on the film take another photo and they will be kind of blended together to create what can be a really cool effect. In the one above I took a shot of a fish tank that also doubled as a window in a pub that also doubled as a Chinese takeaway (I know, bizarre) and then took a photo of Lauren to come up with this shot. There’s a few more examples in the shots below, although I think this is probably my favourite. For anyone that wants to try these, they are tricky concept because you’re exposing the film twice which means it needs half the amount of light on each photo to be correctly exposed; so maybe if you want to try it… y’know, YouTube it first.

Double exposure 35mm photograph of a woman in a wine bar in Melbourne, Australia.

Double exposure 35mm photograph of a woman in Bob Hawke’s Leisure Centre in Sydney, Australia.

Double exposure 35mm photograph of a woman with dark hair smiling at the camera with blurred lights as the second exposure.

Double exposure 35mm photograph of a woman in a blue hair and sunglasses on a beach in Vincentia, Australia.

Double exposure 35mm photograph of a dog mixed with the Australian bush in Narooma, New South Wales.

So there you have it, my first forays into analogue. As I’ve said above, I really enjoyed taking these (and most importantly not having to edit them!) so I hope you’ve enjoyed them too. I’m planning on doing a lot more of this if the cost of the film doesn’t financially cripple me, so assuming I don’t need to sell my laptop to afford it I’ll keep posting the best of these, so keep an eye out. The future is analogue!

Australian Adventures in Analogue

The Falklands

Jack and Lisa’s Wedding

Bobby Shoebotham