The time capsule has been opened!

That’s what it feels like. After about 10 years I finished the film that was in the Pentax P30 and got the film developed. And so here a few of the photos, firstly a birthday cake from about 10 years ago.

We suspect this is Jesse’s 5th birthday cake, caken in Carisbrook in 2003. There was also a couple of photos from the house where we lived in Carisbrook, Victoria. The next photo shows Jesse today, with unruly hair and the ever present MP3 player, taken in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, a few days ago.

While in Wagga Wagga I spotted (actually it wasn’t that hard to see!) a very large almnost derelict looking building, labelled Murrumbidgee Flour Store., My guess is that it was flour mill / warehouse. It was adjacent to the railway, which suggests that at some time or other it was servrd by the railway.

And almost opposite it was a ‘plane on a stick’ – obviously hinting at some sort of link between the armed forces and the township of Wagga.

So there you have it – a 10 year old film, with photos on it spanning almost 10 years. And the P30 camera, with 10 year old batteries, still takes decent looking photos.

It Works!

The Pentax P30 camera mentioned in my previous post works! I put the batteries back into it on Friday just so that the batteries were not likely to get lost, and this morning I showed Eliana the camera and explained that it was older than her and that this type of camera had to use a film which had to get developed into photos rather than connecting it to a computer to download them.

I don’t think she understood! But she got the concept of the manual Zoom and Focus and wandered off to other parts of the house to ‘play’ wth the camera. I told her not to turnthe camera on (which seemed a bit pointless in retrospect as I beleived the batteries were dead). A few minutes later she exclaimed ‘it works’ and came in and showed me that she had taken a photo with it. I tried it and sure enough, it worked. It will still need some new batteries, I am sure, but at least it seems to be working ok. So now we need to use up the film and develop it, and see how the photos turn out.

Ancient Technology?

Following our recent move during the unpacking of boxes and finding stuff we didn’t realise we still had phase (which can last years, under the right conditions), I happened upon a box labelled OLD PENTAX NON_DIGITAL CAMERA.

Inside was a Pentax P30 SLR camera with two Astron lenses  – a 35-70mm zoom and a 70-210mm zoom. I purchased the camera from one of my aunties when I was in my early 20’s (I am 45 now), and used it a lot until about 2001 when it’s position of favour was usurped by one of those new fangled digital cameras – a Kodak 1.3 mega-pixel camera that cost me around $400 at the time. The Kodak has since been replaced with a Fujifilm Finepix S (10 mega pixel, 15x optical zoom, and pretty decent digital zoom).

Upon closer inspection of the camera I noticed that it was ‘on’. Although the batteries have long since run out of juice. I also noticed that the film in the camera had 10 shots already taken, and so had 14 shots left. In the box there was also another unused film. I had thought that film developing was one of those things that had gone the way of the dodo, and the LP Record (remember those?), and leaded petrol. But upon some investigation I found that there is a shop in the regional city nearest us (about 45 minutes away). Hmmm. I’mgetting a hankerin’ for some good old fashioned film photography…