The YWE has been in my calendar and on my radar for a while as it is very close to my house. Of course it has been postponed due to covid, but finally it was here. I bought tickets for myself and my father, who loves guns.
The day before the event I tried to cut some 120 film to 127 ready to use in the VPK as I thought it would be perfect for the WWI section of the grounds.
A weird thing happened though. I knew I didn’t want to use Fomapan as it seemed to scratch in the camera or FCK cutting device. I had one roll of Ilford delta 50 and got to cutting that. When I started to reroll it inside the dark bag, it felt funny, odd. I felt around and realised the film was on the wrong side of the backing paper. I tried to fix the issue, but which side was the emulsion?? I couldn’t tell. So in the end I gave up and took it out of the bag. Sure enough the film was taped to the numbered side of the paper. Somehow in the cutting device the tape had come loose and attached itself to the wrong side of the paper and perfectly rolled onto that side without ‘concertinaring’.
Anyway that meant I only had one roll of Fomapan left to cut and to load inside the VPK.
Once at the event I was so excited, a common theme, that I used up my film before I got the the WWI area, oops.
On developing, the film did indeed have lots of scratches and I fixed some of them post process, but left most of them. Here are my results with the two fogged ends from cutting the backing paper to reduce the width of the roll.
Personally, I love the results, quite authentic. I will try again next year or at another event.
Pretty impressive – WW! would have been even better- but very cool as is!
Yeah, I was intending to go with 2 films, the other in the yashica 44. To be fair the WWI section wasn’t big and you couldn’t wander as much due to covid restrictions. So next year!!
I never gave it much thought- but does WW2 have a ‘soldier’s camera’ like the VPK was for WW1?
That’s a good question, I haven’t thought about it either. This came up on a search though… https://www.photo.net/discuss/threads/typical-camera-used-by-ww2-photographers.272657/
Peggy, Kurt, WW2 I most associate soldiers on the line with Leicas, certainly for the German officers and actually a large number of the allied photojournalist including Hemingway. From what I recall Lee Miller used a Rolliflex, the GIs I tend to associate with the Argus rangefinder, but I have never really had and idea what the British soldiers used. I suspect that they had some difficulty in that it was against orders to carry and use a camera, unlike WWI and the VPK during WWII there wasn’t a cheap small easily hidden camera available for the average Tommy to carry.
I was thinking the leica too, as that is what has been on display at exhibitions I have seen.