Shooting My Shot

Stumbles and fumbles in photography

The other day I mentioned in a note that I have been getting back into film photography. This week, I dropped off a roll of black and white film to be developed at the camera shop. I just got the scans back.

I should mention, if you’re like me, you probably didn’t know how things work these days. It used to be that you’d drop off your film and they would develop the negatives and make prints for you (3x5 or 4x6, matte or glossy). Now, they develop your negatives and then scan them and email you the images. I suppose this makes sense, but I hadn’t realized that this was the way it’s done.

Back to the scans.

They’re not great. They were way more underexposed than I was expecting.

I was trying out a film stock that’s new to me, but comes highly recommended: Ilford FP4 Plus (ISO 125). I read that you can push/pull this film a lot, but I wanted to get a feel for it as is. So I shot by the box and set my ISO to 125.

I’m guessing that either my camera’s light meter needs to be calibrated/tuned up/repaired (Canon AE-1 Program), or the photo shop didn’t properly develop the film. I’ll give the shop the benefit of the doubt for now.

So, here are a few of the pictures I took plus versions that I edited to up the exposure to the level that looks better to me.

I’m not crazy, right?

I was also trying out my various lenses. The photo below was taken with my wide-angle lens. I did not like the way they turned out at all (this one is edited to up the exposure). Very muddy:

Finally, the picture up top with the original scan:

I’ve got another roll of this FP4 in the camera. This time I’m going to push the ISO a bit and see if I get better results.