If #0007 was the test roll, we can call this my first "Real" roll of Reala 100. How did I approach it differently, learning what I had from the first attempt?
The goal was to identify the "reality" of the color/scene reproduction, and offset this with "unreality" through selection of subject and use of optics. This is, I would argue, downright Dialectical.
Some of the major takeaways from the first roll:
Whites come in sharply and earlier than expected.
I first erred on the side of overexposure since it was 10-years expired, and that's the consensus advice. Even short of actual clipping, I ended up with a bunch of color lost to the high end of the curve, and sometimes with post-processing I could pull of it back but at the expense of it looking natural or even usable. I'm used to this from digital photography but had been repeatedly assured by every YouTuber and forum poster this was Not The Case With Film. Liars and charlatans.Red and blue punch through
I had some very pleasant shots in the first roll of neutral scenes that benefited from the white-clipping mentioned above but even in weak winter light and without a polarizer the sky could threaten to overpower them."Normal" scenes will look "normal"
With contrast or separation you get something to work with, but there is no magical "retro" or analog "character" here to zhuzh up a snapshot.So how to integrate this knowledge for a second roll?
- Greens and browns make good baseline for accent colors to pop off.
- Narrower depth of field emphasizes focus drop-off which is unlike normal vision.
- Framing and perspective should avoid standard street/snap photography.
This is a recipe, in my mind, for doing a bunch of bog standard close-up shots of plants. Also it was early May, so there's nothing my soul wanted more than to do that anyway. What a coincidence!
Astute readers who made it this far into the text (wow! hello!) might be wondering how I accomplished that soft-focus effect on the purple flowers in the top right. Well you've earned the secret technique by getting this far: I was walking around all day in Prospect Park with my lens cap off and my sweaty arm grazed the lens so I've got like half a roll of photos like that. This is the only one where it works, really. Maybe this one, too.
I don't talk much about glass but just for context the left shots are with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4D, the top-right Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 Ai-S and bottom right is Nikkor 80-200 f/4.5 Ai on extension rings K1-3. The 24mm might go for $150 tops and the other two you can probably get for $80 each.
CineStill Cs41 2-bath (standard process)
Konica Minolta DiMAGE SE5400II => VueScan => NegativeLabPro