For my latest adventure I returned to NYC for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

It ended up being one of those days where everything seemingly went wrong.

For this trip I was shooting with a new camera, a Canon AE-1 Program, which I had picked up at a flea market a few days prior.

The camera itself works fine, but the light meter is a bit odd and I wasn’t use to the way it functioned. This coupled with a sunny day/tall buildings made for very bright highlights and dark shadows. So hitting proper exposure was a constant task.

Another issue I had with the AE-1 was the placement of the dial to adjust shutter speed. It’s inset pretty far back and I would constantly think I was turning the dial to adjust the shutter speed, but instead was just gliding over the front of the shutter release.

This forced me to keep taking the camera away from my face and adjusting the shutter speed while looking at the camera, causing me to miss whatever moment I was trying to capture.

If the shooting conditions weren’t difficult enough, when I went to develop the film the tank I was using cracked right at the very beginning of the development process, causing developer to start leaking out. I had to keep inverting the tank so all the developer wouldn’t immediately piss out.

This constant agitation and lack of enough developer had a severe affect on the negatives.

After I had completed the first step of developing, I took the tank to a dark room and placed the film reels into another tank before moving on to the next step.

But the damage had been done.

In the end most of the images looked like expired film. Only problem is these were fresh rolls of CineStill 400D and Kodacolor 200, not expired film. Though I still enjoy how the images turned out, it’s not at all what I was aiming for.

Here are some of the images I was able to salvage:

Many things went wrong with these exposures, both during shooting and developing.

With this next image, the camera didn’t properly advance the film, causing multiple frames to overlap. Which honestly looks kind of awesome!

Bumming Around Town

After getting bored with the parade I decided to bum around the city for some street photography. I ended up doing a LOT of walking, all the way from Central Park to Chinatown. My Apple watch, which notoriously undercounts steps in comparison to hiking apps that I use, still put my daily walk at over 16 miles!

During my trek through the city, I made a quick stop at B&H to pick-up some rolls of Lomography 110 film, which I’ll hopefully be shooting soon.

Fortunately the bad development process mainly affected the first half of the rolls, maybe a bit more. I was able to get some solid street photography out of the rolls.

Charmera Photos

As I often like to do, I brought along the Charmera keychain camera as well and snapped a bunch of cruddy little digital images!

My go-to for this thing is signage, street art & things with little bits of detail. Being that it’s a digital camera that I can delete things from, I tend to use it to snap images that I wouldn’t want to spend a film frame on.

This allows me to get a lot more out of a day of shooting while still focusing on film photography!

What the Hell Do I Do Now?

Shooting with pieces of gear you’re unfamiliar with can come at a price. In this case I missed some fascinating little moments because I had to keep taking the camera away from my face to adjust the shutter speed. By the time I was ready, the moment had passed.

With street photography you need to be ready within a fraction of a second. This is why it’s great to be super familiar with whatever camera you’re using in these situations and that it works the way you need it to.

The Canon AE-1 is a great camera, it’s just a bit cumbersome with how I like to shoot. I will continue to use my Minolta X-370 as my main camera, while I test out other cameras for fun.

There’s also the case of not developing the film properly. This is going to happen from time to time. But I will certainly be much more careful in the future when developing to minimize the chances of something like this happening again. While the effects on the improperly developed film turned out super cool, I was intending to go for something else entirely. But I did my best to make it work for me.

In the end I feel pretty lucky to have gotten as many good shots out of the rolls that I did, considering all the issues I had!

If you find yourself in a similar situation don’t get too down. Even if nothing from a roll can be salvaged. Take comfort in the fact that there’s a shit ton more film out there for you to try again with!

And we all get a little lucky sometimes!