Sunday, June 12, 2011

Digital? I don't need no steenkin' digital!

Following a personal trend that I have been following the last few weeks, I went out shooting today. My wife was at the spa in Kensington and she suggested going to Riley park to photograph the flowers. What a great idea! I had a roll of slide film I wanted to use and bright colors tend to work well with slide film. Interestingly enough, though I packed my dSLR with me the whole time I did not shoot one frame with it. Every shot I took was with my film camera.  So right now I have nothing to show for today. Very sorry about that. I know it sucks coming to a photo blog and there's no pictures but they are coming. For now I want to predict what I got though.

First off, as mentioned previously, I think the slide film is really going to show off the colors well. I was using 50 ISO Fuji Velvia which is legendary for how much it makes colors pop. Of course, the subject matter doesn't hurt either.

Secondly, I think that despite the bright day, I handled the exposure well. There is no way of knowing until its developed but I was extra careful with the exposure. Certainly, slide film doesn't have the latitude of dynamic range that color negative film has but I made sure I didn't have any excessively contrasty situations. I shot in the shade when I could and made sure there wasn't anything overly bright or dark when I couldn't shoot in the shade.

Thirdly, I shot about 16 frames today and I think that I am not going to have to junk any of them. I got my exposure correctly and I careful with focus. There were a couple of frames I shot where the wind was moving my subject but I was patient and I waited for the wind to die down. I took my time to get interesting compositions too so they should definitely be more than snapshots.

Its interesting but when I shot film back in the days before I shot digital it was pretty much a crap shoot. I'd load a roll of film and snap until I ran out of film. Most of the time I got an OK shot but a lot of times it was just plain bad. There were even a few times where I hadn't even loaded the film right so I got nothing. It just goes to show that taking the skills I've developed with a digital camera are certainly applicable to the film world.

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