My First Colour Film

OK, I could have written one post on this, but there was quite some time between getting the camera and then getting the negatives, so I am splitting this into two.

This is actually not my first film, that was a roll of ISO 100 B&W.  Lesson #1 in the new world of film photography, B&W film takes ages to get processed, colour is no problem.  I think it used to be the other way around.  I'll post some B&W images if they ever come back.

However, I shot both films in the same area at the same time to have a basis for comparison.  The goal here was to learn the camera and see what I could achieve.  The colour film is ISO 400 Kodak Portra.  Lesson #2, ISO 100 is too slow on a cloudy day, boy did I miss the ability to up the ISO as and when I wished.  If there is a single most important benefit of Digital, auto ISO is it!  Even with ISO 400 film I had to work at getting a shutter speed that would work for me.

But, wow, the camera was a joy to use.  The huge bright viewfinder made framing so much more precise, the manual focus worked well and was quick enough for the imagery I was creating.  This is not a fast action street machine, but you are very sure on what you focus.  The leaf shutter is almost silent, it is hard to tell that the shot has been taken. The lens mounted aperture ring is pretty similar to my X100.  On the whole it was quite similar to using the X100, but just so much more precise.

A key change is the 6x6 format and the resulting square frame, very different to the 3x2 of a DSLR.  This genuinely changed how I framed.  The foreground and background become very much more important and have to be thought about much more than with a 3x2 camera.  I find that I read the photos from front to back, rather from side to side.

The other big change is the manual nature of shooting, every shot needed to be thought about.  The camera has an excellent exposure meter, however, a snowy day meant constant adjustment.  I was also conscious of 12 shots per roll of film and the fact that each photo consumes 1 euro, but this is not a big issue.  I don't buy into the need to use film to slow down, this is a lame excuse, simply slow down, digital cameras only work when the shutter button is pressed.

So how did I do?  Not great, but not bad either.  I have scanned the negatives on my Epson V700 scanner.  This was a rather magical process, to tell the truth, placing these oddly coloured sheets of plastic into holders and then seeing coloured images appear - OK it is not like wet printing, but still rather nice.

My subject was the Isar river and my continuing personal project to document the river as it flows through the city center.  The photos are underexposed a little, the flat white sky and snow on the ground made judging the exposure quite tricky.  However, the overall colour quality is super, very different to digital, and the detail is good.   What I do notice is the exposure latitude. Although they are all a little too dark (I can change that, I know,but chose not to for this exercise) nothing is blown out, I have extreme variations between light and dark in some images and yet there is no loss of detail.  The S curve of film sensitivity truly preserves detail in ways that a Digital sensor cannot.

So far, so good.  I am very happy with this experiment with analog photography.  One final thought, a philosophical point to finish with.  A camera is simply a box with a hole at one end, a device at the other that records light and something in between that determines how much light arrives at the recording device.  Mechanical, Chemical or Digital, the basic processes are the same, a film is a device for recording the number and energy level of photons striking a fixed point in space, a digital sensor does the same.  What happens afterwards differentiates them, not what happens when the shutter opens and closes.