This story begins with an afternoon drive through the local countryside accompanied by my spouse. The air was lovely and warm. The skies were clear. The weather was what we expect for late June in Ohio after enduring six months of gray flannel skies that accompany our winters and much of the spring. As we …
Breaking Digital Habits and Relearning Film With a Leica IIIf – By Christopher DellaCorte Read More
I was originally put off shooting slide film because I had heard that you needed to be incredibly precise with your exposure otherwise the whole shot would be ruined. Frankly, when I was first shooting film, I didn’t have enough confidence in my ability and so I kept away.
Strangely enough it was developing my own black and white film that gave me the confidence to try it. I had previously wondered whether the lab were just really good at salvaging what I’d done, but developing myself meant I could learn from each roll and improve and ultimately I felt that my exposures were good enough to try slide film.
I promised a couple of commenters on my last article that I would share some of the “normal” images from my first batch of C-41 developing. Now that I’ve also shared some results from my experimental dance developing I thought I would follow through on that promise.
For those that haven’t read that first article, essentially I tested my C-41 developing on an expired roll of film despite knowing that it would likely be fogged due to the age of the film. I just wanted to make sure that my developing produced an image and was relatively even, which I personally think it was.
I often get my inspiration from motion pictures, and as a collector of film stocks I look for mundane things to shoot while experimenting with various films that I can get a hold of. Movies such as La Strada by Fellini or Japanese productions from Daiei Film Studios and The Invisible Man stand out to me, as do movies such as Dial M for Murder or Rebel Without a Cause.
Backed by a probable longing for something more tangible and needing a change from the mindless snapping that it so readily fired via the iphone camera, it was about time for me to explore the medium of film photography.
After some digging on the World Wide Web (with the help of 35mmc), I ordered my first film camera off a Japanese camera shop on Etsy, and a week later it arrived at my doorstep. An Olympus superzoom 120. According to what I read, it’s ideal for a beginner in film.
