Yesterday my new batteries arrived for both of my beautiful old SLRs. One is a Pentax K1000 that was my dad’s, it was the camera that took all of our baby photos, and the other is a wonderful Minolta SRT 202 that I inherited from my granddad. I recently bought an assortment of various expired rolls of film from eBay.

To celebrate my two now-working manual cameras, I went for a walk to the woods to test them out.

I loaded my Pentax with old Fujifilm, which developed with beautiful colours and amazing emerald undertones. While my Minolta had an expired roll of Kodak film, with developed with warmer, softer colours. I can’t wait to play with more types of film so I can see the effects each produces.

Look at these colours!

And this typically British summer scene, to think some parts of the country are still supposedly in drought…

There was this beautiful spread of wild flowers in a garden on the way to the woods.

The gateway between mundanity and green heaven.

Mind the stinging nettles on the way through!

The path to lushness.

Wild cherries, glowing in the trees. See the warmer tones of the Kodak film?

The sun came out for my walk, warm and delicious.

And then I experimented with some double exposures, I love this one. You can’t really tell, but it’s two shots of the same fern from two different angles.

Another of my favourites, the colours came out so rich and vibrant!

On the way home my eye was caught by textures.

And shadows.

And that was the end of my rolls of film.

Now that I know both cameras are working perfectly I’ll be playing with them regularly!

For now I’m one very happy clicker.