I got these scans back, and then poof! My love affair with film ended a little bit. I haven't even looked at them until tonight, really, and I got them back a few weeks ago. I was initially very excited to see these, because included is the first roll I shot with my Rolleicord. And those turned out really well! They are Portra 160, and most of them were in focus. To use this camera, I have to concentrate very, very hard. I think the shot of the flowers and the sidewalk took me 15 minutes to compose, because of the way everything moves in the opposite direction you are expecting it to when you move the camera. It is so fun to shoot though- the shutter is probably my favorite shutter experience of any camera ever. None of these are masterfully composed, because I was mostly just working on the manual focus aspect and getting used to the camera, but I really love these photos. Now comes the not good part- a roll of Provia, but it doesn't look like Provia to me, and at least half the roll was underexposed to the point of not being salvageable at all. My worst results so far. I don't know what happened. I was obviously metering totally incorrectly. I am wondering if at some point I was thinking I was shooting another film stock. And I don't really understand why the few photos that are ok don't really have the Provia "wow" thing that I usually see when I shoot it. They just look blah, and this is all that I got worth sharing from that roll.

Here is the roll of Agfa Vista 200. A film stock I have always liked, but certainly nowhere near as much as I liked my Provia results previously. Here are my favorites from that roll.

I had planned for months to shoot only film at the state fair, but then I got these back, and I pretty much totally lost confidence in myself and my film shooting skills. Whatever I thought I knew about film stocks, I don't know. And apparently I am not metering correctly either, although I was using an external light meter and being very careful. It is still the case that every time I get scans back, my opinion of what I like and don't like changes. Where I am now is not really a place where shooting a lot of film fits, but I do want to shoot a few rolls and see if I can get some of the magic back. I am just going to stick with inexpensive film for awhile, instead of slide film. And tomorrow I will share my digital photos of the state fair. I think fairs and film are a perfect match, so maybe I can try again next year to capture the fair experience that way.

When I started taking a film class, I quickly realized that there were definitely going to be days when I would only be shooting film. Most days I do pick up my digital camera at some point, but with the amount of film I am shooting for the workshop I am taking, sometimes that is the only photography I am going to do in a day. And of course that is fine, it just means that before I can post the seven photos I took for the week, I have to wait for the scans to come back. For the black and white film I shot for this week, the lab I chose was Photovision. While I was really happy with a lot of the photos, I wasn't happy with the way they were scanned. Everything came back looking very, very matte, which I am not a fan of. I chose these film stocks based on their contrasty characteristics (Fuji Neopan Acros 100 and Ilford HP5 400). Initially I thought that the photos just looked like that because they are film, but the feedback I got in class is that they shouldn't look that matte. Either it is the way the lab scanned it, or I had exposure issues they were trying to correct and the matte is the result of that. I am waiting to hear back from them to see what they have to say. The photos are easy to fix in Lightroom, just by adding back the missing black and adding a little clarity. I am now waiting on five color rolls of film that I sent to FIND, and I am very, very excited to see the results of those. One of those rolls I shot with my new to me Pentax 645N- a camera that I am OVERJOYED to have, but the purchase of it made me feel guilty. As a result, I returned the Fuji 90mm lens I had just purchased. I loved the lens, but without question I wanted the Pentax more. In reality, neither of the items is very "practical", and I plan to make a very practical lens purchase in the next week or so that is going to be very painful financially. And very heavy. But perfect for my current needs and long term goals. A 70-200, either the Tamron or Nikon version.

Here are my photos for the week. I think that they look very different from my usual photos, both because of the inclusion of film, and just because. We took my son to his first movie, so I had to include a photo of him in the theatre. Even though it wasn't my "best" photo of the day. The sky photo, well, it was seriously the most amazing sky I have ever seen. I had to try to capture the magic of it, somehow. And while you really did have to be there, and I should have shot at ISO 100 on a tripod, I hope you get the idea. And my girls are very, very into cooking lately. They like to help with cooking things, and they create things on their own, and want to try to make plans to prepare family meals by themselves. So the photo is of them eating the banana concoction that they created and felt very proud of.

August Film

Week 22 | 366.2016