The First Roll: Kodak Gold 200

To test whether the light meter and shutter worked on my new Pentax K1000, I went to the beach in March 2019 armed with an expired roll of Kodak Gold 200, leftover from the old days when my family hadn't yet switched to digital.  My results were a bit odd but proved that the camera works.

I set my ISO at 200, not adjusting for the film's expiry, which produced considerable amounts of grain and a turquoise or teal sort of color shift throughout the roll.  I dropped off the roll at the local Walgreens, which doesn't return the negatives with the scans and prints.  The lack of control over scanning led me to decide to send all my future rolls to The Darkroom, and I haven't regretted that decision.  The important part: The Darkroom returns developed negatives.

Anyway, let's get on to the photos.  Because I'd never worked with shutter speeds or aperture settings, I set my shutter speed at 1/250 and kept it largely the same as I adjusted the aperture to adjust exposure.

The first beach photo: a statue of King Neptune at the Virginia Beach oceanfront.

A painted bridge.

The oceanfront.

Keeping the shutter speed the same and adjusting the aperture led to some intriguing examples of a shallow depth of field.

If you look closely, the depth of field is so shallow that only part of the tree is in focus.

The final photo on the first roll of film and my favorite from the roll.

In the end the important question was settled: the camera works.  I still didn't have any unexpired film, but at least I knew that I could make things work.