Agfa Synchro Box Results

A few weeks ago I took my Agfa synchro box out with Fomapan 100 Film. Having never shot film before and being spoiled by the confidence of digital my whole life, I really did not know what to expect. Before this camera, the oldest I had used would be a Canon Powershot from 2004!

I decided to take it with me on a walk through Queen Elizabeth country park as I knew I’d be able to fill the roll up with some decent landscape shots at least. Film already loaded, I took some shots and hoped for the best! on this particular roll of film you get just 8 shots which as you would expect went very quick.

Then it was time to pack it away and get it developed. As a film amateur this was once again way above what I knew so I took it to the film guru Jamie. He has been mentoring me through photography itself, anything from editing, to the basics like using manual lenses and framing. It has been no different with this little film venture of mine.

So it began! so we removed the film from the camera which in itself is a very tricky process as the slightest bit of light even gently touching the film will wash out the image and it is not recoverable. But after taking it out inside of a light sealed box, we got the chemical tub out and although I didn’t get any pictures of this part of the process, it looked something like this…

And after flushing the film out with various solutions, the negatives were ready to hang up and dry.

After a few hours of drying we scanned the images in using a modern digital camera. This was done with his Fujifilm XT-3 (and no I will not be convinced to switch to Fuji). This was probably the easiest part of the process as it was basically just making sure the photo was aligned properly and getting the correct focus to take a digital image of the negative against a clear backing.

And that was it, all images were flipped from a negative and they were ready to be used digitally. Now on this camera you have to remember the lens is about 74 years old so nothing is coming out sharp at all. But for my first time shooting film, it was a really cool experience and has made me think about picking up a proper 35mm SLR to do a portrait shoot or something of the kind. Big thanks to my very talented uncle for teaching me the process all the way from loading the film to scanning it.