Goodwill Find
I’m often poking my head in to thrift stores, hearing stories of the cool cameras my friends find, yet I always seem to come out empty-handed. That’s why I was excited to discover that Goodwill has a searchable online store – making it much easier to find the types of cameras that I’m looking for! It turns out that the Goodwill closest to us here in Seattle’s Central District also happens to be gigantic – and many of the listings I liked were available for pick-up there. I finally won a Petri 7s – which I had bid on because I liked the fact that it opens wide to f1.8!
My husband Joel and I stopped by Goodwill to pick it up last weekend. We were surprised that the store seemed so much smaller than it looked from the outside. Then, we were led by an employee back to the warehouse – that’s where they were hiding what seemed like miles and miles of treasure!! How cool of a job it would be to see all of those items come in daily 
My new toy.
When we got it home, I had to immediately try it out. Everything seemed to be functioning normally, until I closed it up with the film inside. Then, suddenly, the film advance lever wouldn’t budge 
I thought “that’s kind of a bummer – I won this for $15 and a camera repair place would charge way more than that to fix this.” So to Google I went — and to my surprise — found instructions someone had posted on how to fix the problem. Thanks to Joel’s tiny screwdriver set, I was able to fix it within minutes 
Feeling pretty proud of myself.
So I re-loaded and was ready to take photos! Unfortunately, I haven’t had many opportunities to take photos this week though. Since Christmas season is the busiest time for photo labs, I rarely see daylight! I had snapped one of Joel outside one of our new favorite restaurants, Rowhouse Cafe, Sunday after brunch with our friends Erica and Natalia (the Cajun frittata rocks, by the way). I wanted to finish the roll – but because we leave for Michigan Monday, I did the last film run of C-41 this afternoon. It felt strange wasting a roll just for one shot, but I needed to make sure the camera was working before packing it for our trip!! To my delight, that one frame turned out great:
Fuji NPZ 800 (Expired 2006)
I kind of want to type “scan straight from lab – no adjustments” because I think it’s so funny when I read that. Trust me: your lab is adjusting the scan. In this case, I decreased the contrast in the highlights so Joel’s right cheek wasn’t blown-out. But I didn’t change the color, or take it in to Lightroom afterwards, or any of that cheater stuff 
Well I can’t wait to be back in the mitten to see everyone! Hopefully I’ll have a ton of film to share when I return to Emerald City.
Happy Holidays!