what's new --- a summary

Film is forever. I have been quite busy the last weeks and did not post too many pictures. This is many because I have been shooting almost exclusively film the last weeks and it is not too easy to get high quality scans in Germany (more on this later). So what’s my new film love all about? I don’t know. I just felt like it one day and had to get myself a film camera. That was a couple of weeks ago when I bought a Canon AE-1 – almost brand new in perfect condition. I paid like $100 bucks for the camera with 3 lenses. Great buy! (Here is a quick and dirty shot taken with my iPhone)

I really enjoyed shooting film with the camera and then, by accident I found a Leica M6 on eBay – perfect condition. I got it for a bargain and finally my Summicron got united with a Leica body (another crappy one taken with my iPhone)

I haven’t gotten any rolls back yet but I shot five in various settings/conditions… Curious to see the results. At the moment I am trying to figure out my style and I hope that “slowing down” a bit will be helpful…

I also got to experiment with different labs and different films. So far I have about 5 rolls processed and scanned including Kodak Ektar 100, Ilford XP2 400, and some crappy discount rolls. So what lessons did I learn?

1. Getting quality scans is hard. Every lab that I tried – 3 different ones / 3 different price levels – did a shitty job. None of them used profiles for the film. This resulted in all pictures coming back with color casts. Blacks look green etc… I found an easy way to fix this in lightroom: use the curves for the channels separately and slightly reduce the green one.
2. While there are some black-and-white films that can be processed in a C41 process (like the XP2 that I used) which is great, my scans came back with a significant color cast (magenta). This was easily fixed though in Lightroom by converting them to (real) black and white (again).
3. Shooting film in Germany is insanely expensive – maybe everywhere. A typical role of Ektar 100 sets you back around 6 Euros and Velvia 100 around 11 Euros. On top of this the cost for processing and scanning (between 13-17 Euros). So 36 shots set you back around 20 Euros…

At the bottom of the post there are some more pics from my rolls… The first two were taken on Ektar 100 and the first one got some minor extra processing. The black-and-white ones where taken on XP2.

Also I found an interesting book (Film Is Not Dead) about shooting film.

—–

New York. I am heading to New York for the weekend (until Tuesday actually). After some consideration I decided to only take the M6 and a couple of rolls with me. So no spray-and-pray this time…

—–

Japan camera hunter. Shooting film again seems to be quite a trend at the moment. In fact many of the blogs on my blog roll had recently a post about shooting film. One blog however that I found particularly interesting is the Japan Camera Hunter and my favorite on is this hand-made MS-Optical Perar 28mm F/4 Super Triplet lens:

I guess this would be a nice lens for my M6 and it is not too expensive – 55,000 Yen or roughly 550 Euros.

—–

Competitions. I found two interesting competition this week. The more serious one of Steve Huff can be found here. And a more “interesting” one here. From the rules:

1. Must be shot at f2
2. Must be shot at ISO 10,000 (pushed ISO’s from pitiful, low-end gear will be accepted)
3. Must be presented in monochrome
4. Must include camera/lens combo information
5. Must end your post with the phrase: “Sure it has some grain, but it’s very film-like.”

Bonus points will be awarded for:
• Poorly focused images
• Mundane subject matter
• Poor composition
• Lack of contrast
• Blown highlights
• Rationalizing the above traits
• Coming across as a snobish asshat

– shots from my recent AE-1 rolls. 

—–

—–

—–

—–

—–