Finally after waiting for one week, the TLR I ordered from e-bay came. Imagine my sheer joy when seeing the package sitting at the reception calling out my name. From the looks of the receptionist, he must be really happy I am no longer at the reception every other hour asking him has my package arrived.

First thing I did with the camera is to sit in front of my computer with it. This baby cost me one big bomb, I wouldn’t want to explode it on day one by pressing the wrong trigger, would I? Nonetheless, even with my trusty digital manual, it took me at least half an hour to figure out how to open the camera back. Guess you all know now how much IQ there is up there in my skull eh?

After tinkering with it for some time, I finally reached out for the canister of HP5 plus that had been sitting on my table for the whole one week. This is it, after this roll, I can announce to the world I have finally shot medium format!

Armed with my Centon k-100 for metering purposes, I headed over to the St. Stephen Green Park. Since it was lunch time, shooting opportunity was plenty. I think due to my rush to head out, the TLR back actually opened half way while I was shooting. Bye bye two frames. This is very painful since you only get six frames in one roll, that’s 33.3% of my frames gone. Ouch!

Anyway, finishing that one roll was the easy part. The harder part comes now, the development! Once again, I relied on my trusty computer to do some research on developing 120. Google-ing it turned out no info, so I figured it must be same in the loading of film into the tank. I was so wrong.

Things to note when developing b/w 120:

1.There’s actually a paper lining with the negative.
2.You are supposed to remove the paper that lines the negative, not roll the paper together with the film.
3.You are also supposed to make sure when loading the film, the changing bag (in this case, my toilet) is suppose to be light proof.

Believed it or not, my toilet had so much light leak, I could actually see my hands working the film into the reel. To add salt to injury, I am still using that sucky reel that doesn’t “eat” the film properly.

With much prayer, I finally manage to get the negative developed. How did I fare? One good shot on the film, with lots of fogging in the rest. Ah well..there's always tomorrow. Now I just have to figure out how and where in world am I going to keep the negs.