My return to shooting film is certainly not an abandonment of digital, I will continue to shoot with modern digital cameras. This leg of my journey still sees me wielding some of the most advanced digital camera bodies and lenses available in addition to 40-50 year old film SLR's with manual focus lenses. At times these worlds collide and vintage manual focus lenses find their way onto digital bodies by way of mount adapters that became popular with the introduction of the mirrorless camera format.
As of this writing, I have been using local processing labs to develop film and provide most negative scans with processing and any printing done using my established digital workflow. At some point there will be a return to the darkroom, first to develop B&W film. Wet darkroom print development is a possibility but a ways down the road.
Combining Film and Digital, some call it " Figital " , is an interesting hybrid experience. I have been abruptly reminded of dust, scratch and fingerprint issues with negatives. The images in this post were scanned at home using an Epson v500 photo scanner I picked up used with negative holders sourced from a 3rd party. The native Epson software for scanning was easy to use though admittedly I have not had a lot of experience with it and would like to investigate some of the advanced scanning options. Film used was Ilford XP2 that had expired back in the 90's. Following some online advice, I decided to increase exposure x2 by rating the film at ISO 100 and then had it processed normally in C41 process as designed.
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' white clapboard church ' |
I have a number of takeaways from shooting this roll and working with the resulting images. The capture experience with the Canon FTb-n was quite enjoyable. The camera is fully manual with 'match-the-needle' exposure setting using the shutter speed dial on top plate and aperture ring on the lens. Of course the lens was manual focus and the film had to be manually advanced for to the next frame, something that I kept forgetting to do as I've gotten used to the conveniences of digital. A note on film advance, I've decided not to advance the film after I make an exposure but wait until I'm ready to shoot again. This will leave the shutter uncocked (no spring tension of the shutter) in case I don't make any more images and the camera sits unused for a bit. The mechanisms were robustly built back in the day but like me they have seen a few years so no need for more tension than necessary ;-)
More of my thoughts on Figital in a future post ...
'click'
DJE
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