'Rediscovered Fun - Went Back To Film'

Nice photos. I too like to take my film cameras out once and a while. Here is one taken with my Oly XA. Technically perfect? Nope, but I like it anyway....
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I like it too.  

 

Very nice indeed! I think doesnt matter how perfect a photo is, if the image doesnt move you (I think) it's kinda pointless, but if the image moves you, no matter what the quality, sharpness, bokeh, etc... is, it will prove to be a beautiful photograph (just imho of course   )

 

Nice photos. The look, in my opinion, is very different from digital camera. I never owned a film camera so I never knew what people means when they talk about the different look until now.

 

Last week I bought a Minolta MD Rokkor 35-70/3.5 and with it came an X-700 and 5 rolls of Kodak Gold 200 film. The X-700 needs its seals and mirror damper replaced, as usual, but an X-300 that I have lying around, seems alright and so I loaded a film in it and went shooting, for the first time after a 5 years diet of digital. And now I have way more lenses to choose from than I ever did before, from 17mm ultra wide to 300mm serious telephoto; I took a 17/4, 24-50/4 and 70-210/4, all Minolta MD lenses.

• OK, you have to wind the film after each shot. Took me more than half of the film before I got used to that again.
• We had dreary weather today. Even exposure at ISO 200 is a challenge concerning hand-held shutter speeds, let alone ISO 100 (better results with Gold 200 that way). Should have taken fast primes instead of the 24-50/4 and 70-210/4. The 17/4 is alright, 1/30 s should be OK with it.
• The X-300 is a basic camera, no depth-of-field preview and no aperture show in the finder. Oh well. If I can't get rid of the film bug I'll have the X-700 and SR-T 303 serviced.
• Back to hand-held metering like I used to, with an incident light meter (Minolta Flasmeter VI). Felt natural immediately.
• Relatively small outfit, but the bag didn't feel very light and I only have 200mm equivalent...
• Wow, that Minolta 17mm is W-I-D-E! Yeah I know, the Sony 10-18/4 on a NEX is even wider, but it surely is fun to use the Minolta lenses the way they were meant to!
• Wow, an optical viewfinder again. How great is that!

Results? No sir, patience is the keyword here. Have to drop off the film tomorrow and hope to get it back Thursday or so. No unloading the card and see the results immediately on my laptop... OK, where's that full-frame NEX?!

 

Ah, film... I can see the grain even at about 5x7" on my monitor!

I recently hauled out my old Ricoh TLR and shot some Tri-X B&W. The shutter cock and film advance are independent of each other, so if I'm not careful I'll wind up with some empty and/or double-exposed frames. More than once I caught myself looking to play back a preview. (What the... no rear LCD??)

I was too lazy to get the chemicals this time, so I get to recreate that once-familiar ritual of going down to the store to see how it all came out.

I've thought about doing more "hybrid" (i.e. analog capture) work for a long time - my NEX is all ready to go for scanning slides.

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Wine and baguetteS on the last one, was that in France?   I'm actually still in the process of digitizing my slides and I now use the Panasonic GH2 and PanaLeica 45/2.8 for that, works great and a lot faster than the film scanner I have.

 

That was indeed in France.

I scanned my old Kodachromes with dad's Nikon film scanner over a few Christmas visits. It did a good job but now I have a slide copying attachment and would like to see how well it will work with a good macro lens on the NEX-7. (I'm thinking a good 24mp RAW capture might be more malleable...)

 

I also got back to film the other day. I loaded a Minolta X-700 with some Kodak Ektar and went for a walk.

The whole process of shooting film is so tactile and contemplative. It was the most fun shooting photos I've had in a while.

It was also a great feeling to see the old Minolta lenses come to their full potential on the system they were designed for.

I still haven't got the negatives back from the lab, that will be a few days. But even waiting for the results is good fun.

Of course, I'm sure the X-700 leaks light after all these years, I just want to see where and how bad before I fix it.

 

After going through dropping off and picking up the colour negatives from my film outing the other day I'm already cured from wanting to work with film. Heck, when do I find the time to pick up the film at the store where I dropped it off? Why did the (cheap) lab scratch some of the negatives? Wow, scanning the negatives cost me two evenings. Jeez, the colours of my NEX-6 are waaaaay better than these negatives can do: different colour casts in shadows and highlights. Noise like it's shot at ISO 1600 while I was struggling with ISO 100.

But yeah, shooting was fun, seeing a 17mm do what it's supposed to do on a Minolta X-300, my only camera with functional seals and mirror damper.   Now, where's that Sony E-mount full-frame?  

 

I agree that abandoning crop sensors and going full frame digital could be one option after trying lenses on a proper camera.

But still I love the process of handling film and shooting manually. I even felt happy buying the film and getting the recognising smile fron the old photo buff behind the counter.

Some people do get marvellous photos on film. When film is good and done properly, no digital image kan touch it.

For bokeh fans, film will add another dimension to out of focus areas, that a digital sensor just doesn't. And adding film grain after the fact in Lightroom won't do it either.

So I'll stick with film for the summer, at least partially, and see where it leads.

Also, as far as I can tell after some casual pixel-peeping, Ektar 100 won't be much noisier than NEX-7 at ISO 100.

 

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Jazz Quartet by Jeff Addicott, on Flickr

I got the biggest thrill I've had in a long while, scanning my Tri-X negatives last week! What all these plug-ins and simulations try to do, Tri-X just does IME.

I'd never go back to film in a million years for cataloging and selling my glass works. But for these kinds of people shots, I'm seriously thinking about getting the chemicals and developing my own film, then maybe down the road investing in a good film scanner.

This might just negate any need for full-frame digital for me. APS-C actually works better for my applications that prefer a digital capture. For stylized, shallow-focus black & white shots, I've now got a bunch of 35mm SLRs in various states of repair and an old Ricoh medium format TLR that functions as though it were new.  

 

It's funny how audiovisual technology moves in circles. In my day, we couldn't get away from analogue turntables and film cameras fast enough. Static and noise were our enemies. Now people who grew up with digital media can't get back to analogue fast enough.

But one thought. In my darkroom days, I used to hate developing negatives. It's fiddly and the film is so sensitive to timing and temperature. The best option is probably to find a good professional lab to develop negatives and then do the scanning yourself? Developing negatives is the cheapest part of commercial development.

 

As I recall, black & white wasn't too bad for developing my own. The local store charged me $7.50 per roll (for medium format 120). Add $5 per roll for the film itself and you're looking at a buck a frame!   I'll have to price out the chemicals, see if there are significant savings to be had. (Seems like there ought to be - I used to do it a lot when I was a poor college student.)

Color, now that's a whole different thing.

 

Well, here are two samples from my first roll of film in more than a decade. They were shot in a hurry with an Minolta X-700, without really knowing what I was doing. Also, the scans are the cheapest lo-fi jpeg-scans, that don't do justice to the negatives.

Still, I think there is a promise of more fun to come. I just love the way that the film grain creates structures and layers in the photos. I think the close ups were the most interesting, while the wide shots were a bit washed-out and flat compared to digital.

I will look for my negative scanning gear and see if I can rescan them in better quality.

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Minolta x-700 + Minolta MD 28-85 f/3.5-4.5 + Kodak Professional Ektar 100
Back to Film | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

View attachment 5322
Minolta x-700 + Minolta MD 28-85 f/3.5-4.5 + Kodak Professional Ektar 100
Back to Film | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

 

I got a new roll of film and some better scans this time. Now you see the gradients and the really fine grain of the Ektar 100:

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Minolta X-700 + Minolta MD 50mm f/1.7 + Minolta MC7 Macro Converter + Kodak Pro Ektar 100
Filmic Vision | Flickr - Photo Sharing!