I mean as far as taking a trip somewhere and taking only film. As I said a couple weeks ago, I was going to take a chance by taking only film cameras just like in the days before digital. No second chances, just whatever was in your film body and whatever my light meters and my head used.

In case you haven't found your way there yet, take a look at my slideshow for the whole deal or click below.

After that you can keep reading to hear my conclusions from a trip without the digital crutch.

Light meter helps

For shots where I really wanted to get results, I did bring out the Sekonic to check incident light, and this helped a lot especially in non-day light conditions such as in my night shots with Ektar. And for the most part, the meter in my Fujica ST705 seemed to perform adequately. However, in my Pentax K1000, the meter is hopelessly shot so it was Sunny-16 all the way when I used that camera. And you know what? There wasn't a lot of shots that were spoiled because of exposure.

Bad stuff that happened

Considering that one of my considerations for going retro was that I was worried about taking my 30D into the boonies I should have really relaxed. We never got rained on, the kayaks were solid on that little lake, and nothing went missing from our campsite.

On the other hand, my bad luck with mechanical problems continued on this trip. On each of my past two trips out of Vancouver I've had a camera fail and it was no different this time when my Mamiya 645's crank assembly stopped um cranking properly. As a result, some of the frames I thought I had captured were never committed to film.

In another instance, brain lock lead me to prematurely open the back of my Pentax before I had rewound the roll. Oops. There went half of my shots.

Leaving my best equipment at home

Speaking of the loons, I would have killed to have brought along my Canon EF 100-400mm and the 30D when I realized these loons were there just for my benefit and all I could do was paddle close with my ancient Tamron 300mm and teleconverter. Lots of wobbly, far away shots.

But I travelled light

But one thing that I appreciated was that by leaving behind my Canon gear I was actually traveling a lot lighter. For one, my 30D with battery grip is a lot heavier than even my Mamiya 645. Secondly, it also meant I left behind a host of lenses that I would not have left behind going to these places (Sigma 10-20mm, the aforementioned 100-400 telephoto, and probably the all-purpose Tamron 28-75mm). Most days I thought nothing of taking with me the two 35mm bodies and a pocket full of backup film. My Mamiya never strayed far from my car so that never factored into weight.

And some magical stuff you can't capture

Finally, there were moments that wouldn't have ended up on film or on a CF-card or any other visual medium. Like how nice it felt to stop by the side of a river and just walk into it and the water is just right. Or the first night at Champion Lakes when Sarah and I heard the rising duet of the resident pair of loons. As one campgoer said to us later when we mentioned the duet: "that's Canada."

Development costs

And then there were the development costs of getting back almost a dozen rolls of film. Let's call it $60 Canadian.

Summary of links

So, that's the end of that project. If you are just picking this up, you may want to start at the beginning when I first wrote about thinking of going on my trip with just film and keep going down the list.

1. Should I go on vacation with film only?
2. Decision made: film it is
3. Back from the wilderness
4. Scanning 8 rolls is very slow
5. Kootenays by film - preview plus Sunny-16 rule brush up
6. Scanning slide film on the road: Kooteanys with Sensia 200
7. The trip in black and white
8. Scanning done
9. Star trail fail
10. One last black and white
11. Wonderful, beautiful Ektar 100