Back to the basics

So I pestered my father-in-law to bring down his old camera from storage because I love to look at them and figure out how they work. He has a Canon FTb 35mm SLR with a "standard" 50mm f/1.8 lens and a couple of other accessories. After tinkering with it for some time, he discovered that there was still film inside! Who knows what could be stored there and when the last time the camera was used?

Ah, yes, the point of this post. What I've come to realize is that as far as we've come with the technology inside cameras, the foundation of capturing an image remains the same. It all comes down to capturing light. You really had to know what you were doing 20 years ago or else you may have ended up with no pictures on the film because all of the images are white from overexposure or black from underexposure.

Manual settings!!?!?! What's that? You're afraid to use the manual setting on your camera? Well, with this particular camera, everything is manual, literally. Aperture? Set manually on the lens. Shutter speed? Set manually with a dial. ISO/ASA? Also set manually with a dial so you'd better hope you remembered what type of film you put in.

So I took a few test shots to see if I could appropriately guess the exposure because the built in meter had run out of battery 15 years ago. I'm going to get the film processed today so hopefully some of my shots came out.