Some success on film

Today I picked up the negatives and the contact sheet for my first roll of black-and-white film taken in my Yashica, and the first roll I've taken successfully with any manual 35 mm. A contact sheet is where you line up the strips of negatives on a sheet of photo paper and expose the negatives without enlargement. You end up with what you can think of as a sheet of thumbnails, with all your pictures printed the same size as they are on the negative.

I'm happy. Out of 21 pictures, at least 3 are worth printing, and a few others might be worth a try when we've got our own darkroom setup. Several others were technical experiments, and the results are interesting and educational. For example, I took 4 pictures of the same subject, a landscape grouping of a large rock and some decorative grass. I didn't take them because the subject was interesting. I took them to see what it would look like when I used 4 different shutter speed/fstop combinations. The differences in exposure and depth of field are significant. I have a little notebook where I'm recording the shutter speed and fstop for each picture, as well as any other factors that seem significant.

Another thing that I learned is that I can hold the camera steady enough for a clear picture down to a shutter speed of 60, but probably not slower than that.

I think I'll get a few of these printed professionally. I don't know when I might have them scanned in to share digitially. The rest will wait till we can do our own prints. I'm hoping by the end of the month.