Old Film Camera Cycling: A Photographic Escape

When I go out cycling it is almost always to take photographs. It is how I capture the experience of the ride and observe the world around me. The ride for me is a way of escaping, disappearing for a few hours or a day, exploring new landscapes or revisiting old familiar places and building up the moments as memories. The photographs I take help me to hold those memories

Usually they are taken with my digital camera and so the memories are immediately available. As soon as I get home I review and edit the photographs, reliving the day. Just after Easter 2026, though, I went for a cycle ride and this time the photographs were all taken on an old film camera. Once I got home I would have to send the film off to developed and printed or scanned. Now there would be a gap between the day of the cycle ride and seeing the memories.

I tend to go through phases of using one of the film cameras. Sometimes I am very enthusiastic and take a few photographs but then I will put it aside long before the film is used up and the camera gets left in a corner somewhere, the memories wrapped on a spool inside it. Sometimes it can be weeks, months, years even before the film is developed.

There was a film in the Olympus Trip and I was determined to finish it, get it developed and unlock those memories. I had about twenty more photographs to take (although the frame counter on the camera is a little dodgy!).

I was down in Dorset so I headed out for a short bicycle ride around some of my favourite places along the coast to Abbotsbury and back again. It was the last day of my visit and I would be catching the train back to London later that day.

Taking photographs with one of my old film cameras can sometimes seem an act of faith. They all have their own little foibles and I can never be absolutely certain they will come out. The Olympus has the frame counter issue. After the first couple of frames it stops telling me how many pictures I have taken. All I can do is keep winding on until the film goes no further. And I am never completely sure the film is winding on and all I am doing is taking one massive multiple exposure – and this is even though I can feel the film resisting and I can see the rewind lever turning.

However I was determined to finish the film off and so I took it out with me on the cycle ride. I was using Kodak Ektar; it is rated 100 ISO but I was using it at 125 ISO meaning the images would come out a little darker which would hopefully bring out some of the colours of a bright Spring Day.

The photographs I took were mostly of the landscape. The Olympus Trip is very simple on the outside; all I had to do was to leave the focus on the little picture of the mountain and let the camera take care of the exposure with its selenium light meter.

My ride took me out along the undulating coast road from the tiny village of Langton Herring out to Abbotsbury with views of Chesil Beach far below me. St Catherine’s Chapel, once a part of a monastery, stands on a hilltop just outside the village. Then home via an old railway track and a tiny church tucked away at the end of a lane.

Once home and with the film finished I set it off to be developed along with several other rolls of film that had been lying around for a few years (!) A week or so later the images came back to me. As I downloaded the scans the memories of that cycle ride came back to me. Unlike other photographic expeditions the moments had been held in secret and now they emerged. The rolling hills, the blue of the sky, the green of the sea, the distant chapel on the hill top, the remnants of the railway and the secluded churchyard at the end of the lane.

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If you would like to see the route I took click on the map above to view it on Komoot