First date with a film camera. #filmisnotdead

It is an irony that I now own an Olympus OM-2N. When digital cameras took the world by storm, I despised film cameras simply because they weren’t ‘in’ (sounds like Esmé Squalor, isn’t it?). I was quite a naive teenager back then.

I must confess that digital photography is still foreign to me, let alone film. I almost bought a Pentax K1000 after reading tonnes of articles that say the K1000 is a good start for beginners and how it could theoretically last forever being a mechanical camera. My novice instinct told me to go for it. Logic prevailed, and I ended up with an Olympus OM-2N. The large viewfinder and aperture priority mode were helpful.

The manual split prism focusing was tough at first. I went on shooting four rolls, always worrying that something bad might have happened, before I finally got to see the end product.

My biggest fears were:

1. The film roll was somehow not loaded properly. Because of this, I kept tinkering with the rewind knob and doubted whenever the rewind knob didn’t rotate as I advanced the film. Thank goodness the fiddling didn’t affect anything;
2. Blurry photos because of shutter speed and manual focus;
3. Light leak. I opened the cover without fully rewinding the roll after the knob came off probably due to fear no.1; and
4. Getting the exposure all wrong. Well, I got some wrong, but not all.

In the end, it turned out that I was being paranoid. Generally, the photos were sharp, and the camera worked like how it was designed.

Here are the photos from the first four rolls: