A pretty common thing I end up doing to get some much-needed film shooting in, is bringing my camera with me to the beach when me and my wife travel out of town. I love to people watch and It’s even better if I can snap some genuine moments along the way.

While I love to shoot medium format on my TLR, it slows me down getting street photography shots sometimes, and my main 35mm go-to camera is a Canon A2E with the “nifty fifty” Canon 50mm f/1.8.

My Canon A2E + Canon 50mm f/1.8, Austin Newell

This camera has a great light meter and communicates well with the autofocus of the lens. It’s as close to digital as I want to get shooting analog, but it’s very reliable and takes any of the nice Canon EF glass I happen to have available.

I have taken tons of photos at the beach/pier over the years to test out film stocks and cameras as we walk along, but on this roll, I felt I had more photos I liked in one roll than I normally get in a couple of rolls combined.

This roll of Kodak T-MAX 400 actually took some time for me to finish. Once I became the one who had to scan the images in, I got tired of scanning boring shots with no thought put in them. As a result, I try a lot harder to decide If I’m going to like the photo before I take it. 4 out of the 5 shots submitted on this were taken at Pismo Beach, Ca. and the last photo of the wheelchair was taken on a work trip to Las Vegas, Na. and that was the only photo taken in Vegas.

When I shoot people, I just like to catch them doing their thing, no posing or trying to make it a nice photo and I think I got a lot of good shots of people just being people on this roll.

I really feel like I have a wide variety of subjects here, from a father with a baby, to an old man fishing by himself, kids playing together, and even a shot without anyone in it. I really enjoy these 5 shots as they stand together. I developed these at a local lab and scanned them in myself on a Canon 8800F flatbed and converted the negatives using Negative Lab Pro.

This is the first roll that I have scanned trying to keep the film border in and I think I like it a lot, at least on these photos. I like being able to see the full uncropped shot and the border really gives a “window” feel like you could still be looking through a viewfinder. I posted the whole roll on my website here.

~ Austin



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