Raven loves Edgewater Beach in Cleveland. We go down there occasionally to get a quick little 5k run in and then we head over to the dog beach area where she rolls around in the sand like a chinchilla and wades in the water like a little land shark to cool off after the run. This past weekend I lugged along the beast of a camera, the #mamiyarb67 . The #120mm #film stock I used was #portra400. After scanning the film, I tried to get the most natural tones to show though in Lightroom. I kinda like how a couple of the accidental multi-exposures turned out and got a little creative with those ones, I need to play with that a bit more. It feels like layering in Photoshop but also just feels different with how you're creating the layer on the film itself. You have to think about it, take a shot, and plan the composition and then shoot again. There is no "CTRL+Z" to undo creating the layer. That feeling of not being able to just undo what you've done is what I like about film, it makes me pause and think more about the shot that I'm about to capture.
The portra400 has a nice look, I picked up 5 rolls of it, but I'm excited now to try out some other film stocks to see how they compare. Sure, I could just watch some YouTubers compare film and yap about them for 20 minutes, but wheres the fun in that?
It was the first time I've developed color film at home. I used the #Cinestill C-41 kit which made it pretty easy, almost easier than black and white film to be honest. I picked up the cheapest sous vide on Amazon I could find and used that to heat the chems in a water bath. I hadn't bothered to do color film in the past because of having to keep the chemicals at a certain temperature when developing. I still love black and white and may start shooting with C-41 black and white film like the Ilford XP2 super. I shot a couple rolls in the past but developed it with typical black and white development chemicals to see what it looked like. Its a really sharp and contrasty black and white film and I liked it. Developing a c-41 film like that in black and white chems did seem to give it a bit more grain. If I shoot with that when I want to get black and white shots that would consolidate chemicals and processing a bit. The other interesting thing about C-41 development is that the chemicals seem to be a lot more stable and re-usable than the typical dev/stop/fix chemicals you would use for black and white.
Next thing to explore will be making prints on the enlarger like I have with black and white prints.
#photography #filmphotography #analog
