Thomas Countz

[Thomas Countz]

Hello TPF and all of it's members! As you can tell my name is Thomas Countz, I'm a high school student living in Pittsburgh, Pa, blah blah blah. Let me get straight to it.

I don't know what got me into photography, but something did, so I invested in a camera. After long search for a decent DSLR within my budget, I gave up and bought a Canon AE-1 Program with a 50mm prime lens and 2x telephoto lens for $75.00 on Craigslist.

I love my camera, and after only 1 roll of color film, I knew that my hobby would get expensive very quickly if I had to pay $10.00 every time I wanted to see only 24 exposures (that's almost $0.42 a frame!), so I also invested in developing materials so I can develop my own black and white film. (I like black and white better anyway.)

Right now, I only have a 2 reel stainless steel film can and no chemicals, so I need to purchase those, and I have no black and white film (that I can develop myself....funny story I bought black and white film from Wal*mart, some Kodak "Professional" black and white 400 speed...figures you can't develop it in black and white chemicals...how lame...leave it to Wal*mart to get photography stuff I guess)

So my plan now is to get some black and white developing chemicals (and a changing bag for that matter) and some Kodak Tri-X Pan 400 film (which my friend, a fellow photographer, suggests) Woo!....instead of buying an enlarger, I would like to invest in a film scanner so that I can have a higher ability for post-production work (which I rarely do because I don't know how that well) and so I can post them online or give my friends a CD.

As much as I LOVE the look of film, I still want a DSLR. Call me lazy, a non-photographer, amateur, whatever, I think that using a DSLR would be a much better (cheaper, convenient, practical) solution as a photograph learning tool. I'm an all manual person as it is, I would rarely ever let my camera make my artistic choices for me, just digital gives instant results that I can only wish to have. Plus, black and white film is not cheap, especially when I need to order it, there's shipping and handling and all kind of crazy stuff, film over time gets really expensive.

Congratulations if you've read all this, I dub you a true forum professional, and I'm not done.

Really quick I wanted to point out that all my knowledge in photography comes from experience and books, books, and more books.

Flickr: Flickr: thomas.countz's Photostream

Thanks for reading, I hope I have a great time here on TPF!

 

[Nicholas James Photo]

Welcome to TPF Thomas yes I did read it all - you can now set me a test