Doubts

 

I was thinking in buying a medium format camera or even a large format camera. I think 35mm film photography it’s cool but it has the problem that it’s the format with lesser quality, and if I am going to spend money for every time I press the shutter so I’d prefer that the quality of the image worth the time and money spent on it.

But it’s not easy, I don’t live in US, EU or Japan, here in Peru the best places to process are in the small towns, but if I want true quality I have to import the film rolls, I’ve to import the batteries, if I want to repair I have to buy the manuals and repair it myself because the technics are forgetting to repair film cameras.

Ok, I bought from overseas rolls, batteries and parts to repair. I repaired the camera and now it’s working, but now there are again more problems: the laboratories haven’t skilled people to process the film, their scanners are old and domestic and certainly they are forgetting to process the rolls. The costs to get a kit to process in home the film are high, the scanners or macro adds to scan or photograph the films are high, if I change to medium format the prices are higher.

I don’t know if it worth it. Instead to worry in to photograph I am more worried, with film, in gadgets as scanners, tripods, shutter releases, etcetera.

Sol y Luna

 

I’m still experimenting with the Canon EF film camera, and with rolls of expired Kodak ProImage 200. I saw Mitsubishi and Samsung rolls so I’ll give them a try.

What you are seeing is actually a double exposure: two different images projected in just one single frame of film. With the Canon EF I can shoot multiple exposures, not just two. In this case I mixed a sunset with the moon (it’s the white shape above the tree almost in the bottom middle where was previously the sun) It has a nice result: the blue sky has mixed and colored with blue the shadows and clouds and give to the warm sunset tones a cool effect IMHO. To put the moon in that specific place I used the aperture marks in the viewfinder as a guide. If it would be a slide I would have to change the ISO to compensate but with the negative latitude that’s not necessary.

Well, it has to be a nice photograph because it was EXPENSIVE, lol. You’ve to buy a roll, take it to the lab, import batteries and a long etcetera. I am not sure if the longitudinal marks are from the camera (I think not) or from the lab (perhaps) or from the expired film (I hope so)

Anyway, I’ll see if I can take sea photographs, tomorrow I’m travelling to the coast. It would be fantastic to go to the beach a bit ;-)

*x*

*x*

I was thinking in pu^blish these with yesterday’s post, but to not seem repetitive I am publishing them here. I find the cats fascinating, sure also is truth that a lot of people thinks otherwise, but the life is so short to be worried about the tastes of others.

la gata

barrier

Jump!

inquisitive whiteness

personal abysm

he’s not coming

It’s great, the highlights never seem to clip, with digital I have to compensate the exposure negatively, mostly with white and red colors.

Canon EF film experiment

meditative houyhnhnm

I’m going to sound old but well, here it comes: when I was a child the memories were recorded with 135mm film cameras. They were compact cameras and very popular, in home dad had a Olympus Pen, a Zenith (Olympic version) and a defective Canon EF camera, this is a FD mount camera, before they made cameras with autofocus and the lenses were EF mount. I am preparing the review of that camera because I don’t see much data in Internet. I downloaded the manual from Butkus and sent him a donation for the kindness.

Father gave me that camera and I could repair it, I bought new weincell’s batteries and a spare body for eleven bucks in ebay to replace the damaged parts. Some time ago I took photographs of Ayaviri city but the lab did a horrible work with the negatives so I found a better laboratory. I used expired Kodak ProImage 200 film to try the camera. I processed the jpeg photos in Photo Ninja, the most adjustment was correction of contrast and nothing more; few have more corrections to reduce color casts and bands for the expired roll I guess.

I took the next photograph, that I published days ago, almost at night. The battery wasn’t working so it took just a one second exposure. Fortunately it could see the leaves and the photo resulted as I wanted.

(Please, have in mind that I took these pictures as a test)

autumn void

Merlin’s tomb

Fibonacci

vegetal vortex

Playboy transport

cusqueña

tree falling from border

rest with me

Yellow end of the world

urban life

This was a multiple exposure photo. The camera has a button to take that kind of photos, just one has to adjust the ISO dial in relation to the number of exposures, but this was for an error, my error, at loading the film roll. So it wasn’t intentional…

I liked the photographs so I bought Kodak Portra 160 and I am going to buy also Fuji astia 100 and velvia 50.

neo gothic echoe

But…

Actually I still see film photographs, at least from 35mm with a personal defect: They look a bit dreamlike, that’s fantastic if one wants that effect but when I was a child I always felt betrayed at see the photographs different from my memory record. So to record the things I see I prefer a digital camera with all of its defects. By the way I feel the same for digital medium format, it has so much sharpness that to me is unreal, also different to my idea in my mind of reality, something similar to the movies in 4K.

But to other things, more abstract or that I like to give a dreamlike atmosphere I would be glad to use film. And about filters upon digital files I don’t find much sense, you have to pay expensive software. If you want a film aspect so shoot film, if you want a digital aspect so shoot digital. I find it reasonable if the film preset is to tune colors and have a better image, as a starting point, but not to mimic.

autum(n) void

 

Today I picked up the roll from the lab. Fortunately with better luck. And the photos went well considering, among other things, that the camera is broken, the roll expired at least five years ago and I put the roll wrongly :D

But I like how they come so I am going to try more film rolls and make sure that the camera this time is perfectly working.