On Film, Part 3: The Frames that made my bones

Can anyone out there in the film photography world recall the specific frames that made them fall in love with a particular film stock or film in general? Up until June 2013, I mostly stuck to B&W and only dabbled in color film. If I shot color, it was most likely FujiChrome but E6 was becoming harder and more expensive to have processed in my city, so I just kind of abandoned color all together.

Then a friend sent me a text from the DC Pride Parade telling me to get down there to grab some frames. I thought "Pride" "Parade" "Reveling" - COLOR. So I dug through the freezer and found two rolls of extremely expired Kodak Gold 200 and hit the streets. I arrived right at the onset of golden hour and ripped through the two 24 frame rolls in no time, completely oblivious to the rules and strategies of overexposing expired color negative film. But I didn't care, this was just a fun trip through the final few blocks of the parade:

The results from the lab were hit or miss, with the hits being a huge whiff (WAY underexposed) but the hits, well..these two frames featured above rang my head like a gong and woke me up to the incredible qualities of color negative. Especially expired cheapo films. My digital color work has never been the same and I'm almost always striving for that hyper contrasty, saturated look of well exposed KodakGold.

Does anyone else have frames of theirs in mind that simply made them reconsider everything that came before then? It's amazing how these things stick around in our minds. Below are a few more favorites from the two rolls I shot that afternoon, forever changing my approach to color. 

On Film, Part 2: Metering and Shooting Film

Picking up from where I left off last week's overview of the most abundant films currently in production is this sprawling ramble about metering techniques for film. Analog film and digital sensors capture various aspects of the color and light spectrum in very different ways, so it's good to know the different between the two and how to exploit their respective strengths.

Modern digital sensors can capture and retain an ungodly amount of useable information in the shadow areas of a scene and, generally speaking, color negative and true black and white film can do all sorts of wonderful things with highlights that are well beyond the reach of digital sensors. Keeping this in mind, I have two general approaches to metering any given scene, depending on which hammer (I mean camera) that is in my hands as well as the overall look and feel that I am trying to achieve. Film? I meter in the shadow areas to make sure all details in the darker realm of the light spectrum are captured before pressing the shutter. Exposing for the shadows usually pushes the highlights to near "unusable" realms, but color negative film has much more gradual transitions between highlights to blowouts that you can kind of let the highlights do what they want.

On Film, Part 1 of who knows how many; Film Stocks

Alright folks, here's part 1 of who knows how many blogposts about shooting film. These are basically a collective brain dump that have accumulated in my head over the course of the past few years of working with the medium. The vast majority of these posts are adopted from some info I recently put together for a brand new Facebook group geared specifically towards Washington, DC Film Shooters, but some of the info is pretty generic and should apply to film shooters located throughout the world. 

The thoughts, words & opinions that make up this series are of my own and should not at all be considered gospel. They are simply my general thoughts on a number of aspects of the film photography work flow, and should be looked at as a guide for avid film photographers as well as digital photographers that are looking into trying film for the first time. (It doesn't hurt, trust me!) 

The first installment of what might become many will be some general thoughts about the primary film stocks offered by what I will call The Big Three film manufacturers today; Kodak, Ilford & FujiFilm, plus some additional info about Lomography and Instant Films.