When focus is not as critical

In my experience, there are cameras prone to mistakes. But, also in my experience, most mistakes are because I am prone to them.

For May month, the month of Commie Cameras, I put a roll of Kodak Portra 400 (expired in early 2015, so not very old) in my HongMei HM-1 folding camera. It is a good Chinese camera, about forty-maybe-fifty years old, and mine is in good shape. During the couple of weeks of May that I carried it with me, I looked for subjects that would be best served by this square-format roll-film camera. Then, having taken only ten of the twelve available shots on the roll, I rushed it in to the lab a few days ago, hoping to get it back by the end of the CommieCam month. Of the ten shots, I had taken five portraits of people I knew, and I was expecting good results.

Prone-to-mistake Me, though, had absent-mindedly treated the focus ring as being in feet rather than in metres! (I was thinking of another similar camera, my Life-o-Martic III which *is* in feet.) So all my portrait-distance shots were seriously fuzzy. Sigh. They were shots I'll never get again.

Near the end of the roll, I had it on a walk across town, and this scene struck me as worth recording. It would have been well-served by being on a tripod instead of in my hands, but otherwise I like the picture. One shot out of ten, and another CommieCam month wasted!

I have another roll of Portra in the HongMei now and I won't be making the same mistake again.