For the first time in... about... twenty-six years, I took some film pictures. Taking film pictures was the only way to record visual images when I got into photography, and I took exclusively still pictures (I would have liked to try taking film movies, but couldn't afford to) with film cameras until 1990, when I bought my first (analog) video camera. From early 1990 until mid-1993 I took video exclusively and then (temporarily) gave up on video in 1993 (after all the cameras were worn out) and bought a Nikon FM2. I took still photos with that until 1997, when I lost the Nikon FM2 camera (depressing event). At the time, I couldn't afford to buy a proper replacement camera, so instead of buying a low-quality cheap camera, I stopped taking photos and recorded the things I saw with handwritten text instead. In the year 2000, I could finally afford to buy a camera again and I bought my first digital camera. From 2000 until about 2007, I took a lot of digital still photos and then gradually got back into video (with digital cameras).
So... that's the background. I've always considered my years with film cameras to be good training in composition and thinking about images before taking them, but basically prefer digital photography, since I like to take a lot of images and even when there was only film to work with, I would dream of having a camera that would allow me to take as many pictures as I wanted to take, which became a reality with digital cameras. That said, there are nice aspects to using a fully mechanical camera and taking film pictures. You can't see the results until after processing, so you are much more careful with each image. And the analog photos, even after they've been digitized to publish online, have a different quality to them than digital photos. Considering that the "filters" people use with micro-computer slabs can produce similar effects, I suppose the color balance is a big part of it, but in any case, the images I'm using for this blog post were all taken with a vintage rangefinder camera onto film, and then digitized after processing.
Since these pictures were the first ones I've taken with film in a quarter century and also from the first roll of film I've taken with a vintage rangefinder camera that I recently acquired, they're kind of test pictures. That being the case, I'll make some technical comments and also include two or three images I probably wouldn't have used had I been taking pictures with my usual camera. Okay, so let's get to the pictures!
The picture up at the top of this post is my favorite picture from the roll, so I've put that in the most prominent location. The second picture is from the same location. The third picture is one I want to make some technical comments about. It was underexposed, and I need to figure out the cause. The vintage camera I'm using is fully manual and doesn't have any kind of internal light meter, so I'm using an old vintage light meter to see what shutter speed and aperture settings I need. Color negative film has a wide latitude, so you can have under or overexposed images and the prints will still turn out okay, but this picture is pretty obviously underexposed (which you can tell from the excessive grain and lack of color saturation). I think it must be either due to the age of the camera having shifted the actual speed of the shutter (versus what the settings indicate) and/or the old light meter I'm using isn't very accurate. And the fourth picture (above this block of text) I would title: Wintertime Tokyo. This image has that general look of digitized photos from decades ago... but it was taken in January 2023.
The color balance is way off for this picture (above). Since the camera is purely mechanical and the image was recorded onto film, the color balance was set (automatically by a machine I think) when the film was processed and digitized. I could readjust it, but the purpose of this post to highlight the results of my first roll of film taken in a very long time, with a vintage camera used by me for the first time, so I'll just leave it as is.
I like this photo, but hate that it's a little crooked (meaning I wasn't holding the camera exactly straight). And that's it for this blog post. I'll still be primarily taking digital photos, but I'm planning to take film pictures from time-to-time.
- Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/ - lookback1997.blogspot.jp/
