My friend Ilana is Turning the big 3-0 this year so to celebrate we all had dirty martinis and wore our fanciest garments! Also I brought both cameras and a new (old) vintage battery powered Cannon Speed lite 199A for my Canon AE-1p!

I can’t remember what settings I used. the flash can be used in an automatic sense where you set the distance and the ISO on the back of it and it controls the camera and the F-stop. Still learning!

Ilana also got some very appropriately numbered balloons to pose with!

Emily squeezed through the zero!

Then we all posed with our outfits! I wore suspenders, as it is the only 20’ish thing I own, Ilana wore a fancy two piece glittery outfit, and Emily had her classic black dress.

The Girls love posing and Ilana’s apartment has really cool lights that make for great colors!

Then I stuck a plant in the front of the camera to make some cool foreground blurry elements.

After this I started to get brave enough to use the Flash. I got this vintage Speedlite 199A on eBay for $29.99. I blinded the girls a couple of times on the balcony before I had them pose a bit off to the left.

I love the way these images came out. It looks like a vogue shoot haha! Your supposed to put the aperture in automatic mode and then choose the settings on the flash itself. But I think I had the aperture set manually and the flash was just doing what ever it wanted to do. I need to re read the manual.

These photos came out slightly blurry which means I changed some settings. I should have written down the settings. But they still look great.

Happy birthday Ilana! Welcome to 30, I promise it will be even better than your 20’s Im having a blast so far and I’m only 3 years in. Partying with a 40 year old camera makes you think, no matter how long I live. The camera will still be older than me.