A Little Experiment with Film

For Christmas Cat got me a Contax 645 so I could continue my love affair with film, plus it was a great tax write off :) I say that Cat got it for me, but I was included on the buying process to make sure we got what we needed, but it was her idea!

Rewind a little bit, for my birthday Cat got me another film camera, the Canon 1V, to see if I liked film like I thought that I would. I immediately fell in love and wanted to forge on with film!

We decided that we wanted to get a top-of-the-line film camera so we started to do some research on what our options were. Time after time, the Contax 645 came up. Almost all of the film shooters that we drool over shoot with this camera. We finally found a Contax online that had all of the pieces that we wanted. The right lens, accessories, and was in good shape. Once we ordered it, the wait started!

Finally on Christmas Eve Eve, the UPS man showed up at my parents house and I tackled him in the drive way! I was so concerned that the snowpocalypse would delay our order that I squealed when I saw the signature brown delivery truck show up!

I started looking at the camera, turning knobs, and taking pictures of Cat with no film loaded. I was saying thinks like "Oh...work it!" or "Give me la tigre" Then it was finally time to get serious and take some real pictures.

I love that with digital you get to see instantly what the image looks like. Not so with film! So I wanted to set up a "test" of sorts to try some different things to get more comfortable with the results that I would expect with my shooting style.

I set up a table in my parents dining room, much to my moms chagrin, and got out a notebook to write down everything I did, camera settings, lighting, random thoughts that popped in my head, etc.

Once I shot two rolls of film, I ran (or drove really quickly) to the post office and sent them to RIchard Photo Lab. This began the longest 2-3 weeks I have ever experienced in my life!

Today, the wait ended. While I was eating lunch my email went off and the subject said "Your order is ready!" I ran from the table back to the office and stared to download all of my scans.

One by one I went through the images and compared them to my notes and studied each one closely. I really wanted to see what happened to the images when I overexposed them by as much as two full stops! You can see the results with these side by side images. The in-camera meter suggested the exposure on the left and the image on the right is over exposed by two stops.

Just like I expected from what I have read, with film, the longer the exposure the more saturation and contrast is introduced in to the image. I haven't touched any of these images in Photoshop, the differences were all from a longer exposure.

My next scans should be using my handheld Sekonic 508 meter. You can bet that I am anxious to get those back!

Happy Thursday!