Recently I had the opportunity to teach a young man about film photography. He asked me if he could borrow a film camera as he wanted to take some black and white pictures. He already has a Fuji mirrorless camera and is getting very creative.

I offered him the use of my old Pentax K1000 and this is where it got interesting, I realised when we started talking that he had no idea how a film camera actually worked, which is understandable, and also that the concept of using a manual camera with a light meter was a very different proposition to the digital world in which he has grown up. The whole concept of adjusting your settings for each shot, and not having the camera auto focus or set the speed and aperture is something he was going to have to learn.

He has some very ambitious plans to take black and white images around old church yards in the fading light of day, his vision is for stark, bold images with high contrast. A really tall order for your first time out with a film camera one would think.

We did the basics, how to load a spool, how to take images, and rewind the spool when he is finished, how to use a light meter after setting the ISO of the film, we talked about shutter speed, aperture, focal length and manual focusing. We also covered good camera posture (No image stabilization on the K1000) and he was ready to go....... Well not quite.

He has one advantage over me, he can take the Fuji with him, set up test shots mimic the aperture and speed and get a pretty good idea how the shot is likely to come out. In my day it was take the shots and wait till I got home to my darkroom to see if I had really cracked it.

The proof as they say, will be in the pudding. I will post one or two of his images once he gets them printed.

The software available today to modify images is very powerful, whether this be Photoshop, Lightroom, or Paintshop Pro which is what I use.

All of these products give you the capability to change the original image and add some effects.

In this simple example below, you will see some images that I took of a local moonrise and they have all been given a bit of a work-over to create different effects.

I am looking at some of my earliest digital photos, and am going to start reinventing them, as all the metadata is there waiting to be exploited with the software

This is the original image, taken with ISO set at 6400. the moon was just coming up and it was getting dark very quickly.

In this example I have used HDR (High Dynamics Range) to accentuate the island and yacht structure. The sea and sky are now purple.

By changing the colour scheme and making everything black, then highlighting the whites, the image could look like this. There is a lot of noise, but ideal as a small image to showcase this point.

This is using the Art Media effects on the software to create a surreal set of colours.

The debate around Mirrorless v the traditional DSLR is an interesting one. I was very much involved at the time that film was switching over to digital in 2002/3 where my publishers were still asking for colour transparency film as it was easier to do colour separations for high quality magazine work, So I held off for a while sticking to my medium format film cameras before I embraced digital fully.

I see the same debate happening again, and even though I am really really committed to my "Mirrored" cameras I think that eventually this new format will win out in the end. The one turning point will be when there are sufficient connectors to allow users to use existing lenses or manufacturers make the bodies capable of accepting these lenses, and I think the other will be when some of the big name photographers and mainstream publications broadcast widely that the images within the publications were all taken with the newer technology.

I have both, but still use my traditional DSLR 90% of the time at this stage. Time will tell.

If you have an old film SLR camera lurking in the cupboard, and you were familiar with full manual mode, adjusting the apeture and shutter speed and then focussing manually, then you may well be able to use your old lenses with a new DSLR.

I was always a Pentax man and found that I was able to purchase a connector ring for my new canon and then I was able to place my old lenes on my new camera.

See this for example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Adapter-Ring-Pentax-PK-Lens-to-Canon-EOS-760D-750D-100D-1200D-70D-600D-5D-III-7D/272998082994?hash=item3f8ff429b2:g:v~MAAOSwaZdXIbmx

This then allowed me to add my Tonkina 300mm lens with a Pentax 2X converter to a canon DSLR.

It should be noted that the lens in this case is in fully manual mode (But hey, that is what I learned to do 40 years ago, before we had autofocus and image stabilisation.)