So how did it go with the camera. In a word – disastrous!

When I got the scans back I could barely see anything. Looking at the histogram everything was clustered into a small area in the middle, indicating that there was virtually no contrast at all (I think).

I’ve used quite a number of old film cameras and even though I’ve lost a few frames here and then I’ve never had something like this: a complete roll that’s useless. I’ve no idea what went wrong. Was it something I did? I doubt it. The camera has little in the way of controls so I doubt I could have set something incorrectly. I noted that the camera already had a film inside when I got it. I have no idea how long it had been there. Could it have degraded to such an extent that this happened? Maybe a problem with the camera itself? It seemed to be working, but who knows?

After some tweaking in Lightroom I managed to make the images visible if nothing else. I’ve posted a few here since I think it’s worth celebrating failures as well as successes. They remind me of some of pictures I’ve seen from the very early days of photography.

I’m tempted to try the camera again with a fresh roll of film to see what I get. But the cost of the film plus the cost of processing and scanning deters me. But I can be stubborn and I’d really like to know if the camera is working even if, at its best, it’s probably not such a great camera. We’ll see.