Not quite my own place, but I have a darkroom induction course arranged for Tuesday morning. Once I've proven that I know what to do with various chemicals I'll be able to book a shared darkroom for up to four hours at a time. I assume this community space has only b/w chemicals but if it has C-41 / E6 too, so much the better.

If not, a new local photolab is opening in May called Photoghost. This'll save on postage costs, and it will be nice to have a shop staffed with film shooters. Aberdeen's old Jessops staff always frightened me a bit by squeezing medium format rolls and not knowing what Ilford is - even sounding surprised that, yes, they had film in stock themselves.

Went out on Saturday with these two cameras:



Finished each one's roll on Sunday afternoon - mainly multiple exposures of stone circles. Unfortunately, the Nettar's one turned out to be a fat roll, so it'll likely have strong light leaks. This happened last time, too - I'll have to tighten up the film chamber brace, but its shutter has recently jammed once or twice as well. Worrying. I may have to use the other camera as back-up more often.

This second camera is a Foinar Foitzik Trier, a rare-ish 1950s German folder (bought for the princely sum of £1.00 at Tynemouth market a few years ago). It has various things wrong with it - mostly cosmetic - the chief being that the lens sometimes falls off when focusing closer than four feet away. It's a painfully tedious process trying to fix it back on in the proper alignment, but when it does work, it works very well indeed.

Each film was a Fuji NPL 160 (tungsten-based). The Foitzik's will be doubly strange since it was rescued from a Kodak 620 folder that jammed around frame 8 - since it had multiple exposures too, it's likely to be badly overexposed in any case. Interesting!