New babies, New Year, New Project!

Over the Christmas holidays, our sister-in-law surprised us with a big box of old analogue cameras which had accumulated at her house from past relatives, etc. She told us to go through them and take whatever we wanted. We were like kids in a candy store!! We were so happy!

These are all the new babies that we brought home with us:

The two cameras on the far left are both Kodak Instamatic. The blue one is a Hawkeye R4 (1965-1971) and the brown on is a X15F (1976-1988). Both take 126mm film cartridges, which are very difficult to find. They both had old, partially used rolls in them already. We just finished them off  but still need to get them developed. We are going to try to get the developers to keep the cartridges for us so that we can try to reload them with regular 35mm film using this awesome tutorial from lomography.com.
The super awesome looking camera in the center is a Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515 (I think), made in Germany between 1934-1958. It also takes an unusual but slightly easier to find film size - 120mm, which can be bought at a few specialty shops around town, or ordered online. I am most excited and anxious to try this one out. I really hope that it works!
Next, is a pretty high tech Nikon FE (1978-1983) which has even more manual settings than our Pentax K1000 cameras, and a lovely 43-86mm lens. This one is going to take some reading and experimenting to master, but at least it take regular 35mm film!
Finally, the beautiful silver camera on the left with the lovely brown leather case (we both actually "oooh-ed" when we pulled it out), is a Kodak Retinette IA which was produced from 1963-1967. I already shot a 35mm roll with this one, and though it looks very pretty, it is not particularily practical. There are limited settings and the focusing uses a "distance focus" system which I find slightly frusterating (I had a lot of blurry photos in my first roll). I am not giving up on it just yet. I'll definitely come back to it in a little while.

As a very important side note - those two beautiful photo albums in the background were gifts from one of my dearest friends Erin. She sent them to Jeffrey and I for Christmas. I can't wait to fill them up!

And with all these new cameras and a brand new year beginning, I was inspired to join a new photo project for 2012. I am still going to pop into the Weekly Assignment Group (which has also been revamped), but will remain focused on shooting more film. The film26 project is organized by the lovely ladies over at Girl's Guide to Gear, and is a challenge to shoot a year in film. The year is divided into 2-week long projects, every project representing a letter of the alphabet. So for January, I took pictures inspired by the letter A for 2 weeks, then by the letter B for the next two weeks. In February I will start C, and so on and so forth. I am really excited for this project and to get to know all of my cameras a little better, and to hopefully improve my photography skills.
I am also thinking of ordering some (pricey!) polaroid film from the Impossible Film Project, since we have 4 different polaroid type cameras all lying around with nothing to do.

Expanding my horizons in 2012!!