My first roll of film after 4 years... (The Analog Pilot Episode)

Hello friends,

Welcome to the new saga of this newsletter: film photography, where you can see me suffer and get hurt for my art 👌👌👌.

I’ve been dying waiting for this one roll of film to comeback from the lab. It’s only 3 days, which is probably pretty typical for motion picture film (I’m shooting a roll of Kodak Vision3 500T). And yet it felt like 80 years.

They just sent me the scanned files of this roll at around 11pm. Needless to say, I’m now unable to sleep anymore and have to bang out this post furiously on my keyboard just to get it out of my system. Excuse my ramblings, I guess.

These photos have to be some of the worst photos I have ever taken in my life, and I’m absolutely in love with them and can’t wait to get hurt again.

But let’s go back a bit.

From where we left off in the last episode…

After the big decision of going back to film, I ordered a Canon A1 to go with my set of Canon FD lenses I already had lying around, plus a 24-35mm f3.5 to shoot wide angle-ish, which has been quickly becoming my favorite focal length range.

Side note: I’m putting affiliate links here just because. Those prices on Amazon are quite expensive though, compared to what I can find locally. Hope you can find good deals somewhere else if you jump into all these 👌.

I also got an Olympus XA (the original one), because I’m a sucker for point and shoots. But that’s a story for another day, I guess.

Anyways, the A1 came and I rushed out the door to shoot a test roll with it. Having been binging the greatest film photography documentary series of all time for so long, I thought that I was somehow became an expert or some shit. How wrong I was lol.

My dumb ass made so many dumbass rookie mistakes, there are barely any photos worth showing in this roll that I’m not deeply embarrassed 🤦.

Here are some of them anyways, and the things I got so wrong, so you can laugh at my face for leaving the sweet comfort arms of digital photography 😉.

First, a bit more context

For the majority of this roll, I decided that I’m actually going to use the 50mm f1.4, just because I wanted to play around with this focal length again.

I’ve been shooting a bit wider lately, mostly hovering around the 28-40 range. Shooting 50mm feels really tight these days, because of the tight sprawling streets and alleys of Hanoi in general.

Though, it really does feel like the 50mm field of view has something special to it that’s hard to describe. 

Maybe it’s “just” the right amount of compression to make the subject stand out and really pop, while still relatively look normal and not too compressed. I’ve come to realized that it’s a very “poetic” feeling focal length, if that makes sense, and I hope to shoot with it more when possible.

What went wrong.

Anyways, initially I questioned if the camera I bought has focus problems or something. But I thought about it a bit more and I guess it’s more likely that I just suck 🙂.

My roll of Kodak Vision 3 500T was not very fresh in the first place. It was an old roll in the fridge that I didn’t mind litting up on fire to test the camera.

When I got the roll, it was rated at 200 ISO already. This roll enjoyed 4 years of cryosleep in my freezer, but I thought it needed a bit more light anyways.

Overexposing this stock will in theory warm the photo up a bit to wash off that tungsten cast, and that led me to rate this roll at a measly 125 ISO (which turned out doesn’t matter anyways because the lab scan I get seemed to already auto warm the photo for me. It seemed like my photos even ended up a bit too warm, which gave off a Kodak Gold vibe or something). Hold that thought.

Anyways, Hanoi was in quite the moody teenager phase. It’s been drizzling, hazy, cold and dark for the past few weeks, with no signs of the sun anywhere.

There’s just barely any light available out in the streets that my digital ass didn’t understand.

Now if you were shooting digital, it would be no biggie. Just let Auto ISO ride to 1600 or something and everything is gucci.

But this is film, and I committed myself to 125 ISO in heavy overcast. Which meant shooting wide open at f1.4 for most of this roll. (and always hovering around 1/60s)

And man, that kinda sucks.

I guess this is pretty much the root of how most of these goes so wrong: Not enough light.

Mistake #1: Missed Focus

Focusing at F1.4 is just not very easy in general. There was very little depth of field to work with.

Also, I only shot with rangefinders before, and SLRs seemed like a different beast. I’ll probably get used to it eventually, but this first roll didn’t go very well, to say the least.

Sometimes I would forget to focus all together too, so that was fun 🙂. Also, I completely forgot about this classic theory of hyperfocal distance to get more things in focus, and hence so many photos from this roll has this thing where the back is sharp but the front is out of focus, which is just butt ugly.

Just got too comfortable with auto focus and larger DOF from smaller sensors camera, I guess.

Mistake #2: Motion Blur

Yup. The A1 has auto exposures which I left on aperture priority, and sometimes I’d forget to notice the shutter speed, which dipped below 30 for a few of these frames. That probably makes it quite easy to get a soft photo.

Think about it, for these conditions, shutter priority and leave it at something safe like at least 1/60 seconds would have been better I guess.

The Canon A1’s exposure settings are kinda finicky, is my justification, I guess. The autoexposure modes are very nice and modern, like what you’d find in a modern DSLR or mirrorless. But it’s quite annoying if you want to switch to full manual. You don’t actually control the aperture with the lens, unless you’re in full manual. Instead you have a front dial that controls both aperture and shutter speed. Having 2 different places to control aperture is… urgh, so I just shoot in the priority modes.

Which is fine mostly… unless in a tricky lighting situation when I want more control, then it’s kinda messy.

The light meter in full manual is quite annoying. It only shows the recommended SS and Aperture. Exposure compensation dial has a lock which is also very annoying. It’s just not very fluid to take charge of the camera.

I guess “Tiny annoyances” are my gripe of the A1. I’d probably prefer a “simpler” one with normal shutter speed and aperture dials, hence why I’m getting a FTb body, which is very cheap actually locally (like 30-40 bucks top). Maybe I’ll do a full comparison in the future.

Mistake #3: Lens performance

F1.4 on these vintage lenses is just a tad too soft sometimes for the kind of photos that I often take or something.

I think I’m pretty spoiled in general when it comes to lens performance, because even wide open, most modern lenses are more than sharp enough to me anyways.

Wide open on this Canon FD lens, and I think a lot of vintage lenses in general, is just kinda a lot softer than what we’re used to in digital, with pretty heavy vignetting.

Me missing focus left and right probably didn’t help.

It’s definitely a look that’s quite dreamy and “impressionistic”, and maybe I’ll grow to like it and be more intentional with it when the mood strikes. In general though I think film is soft enough that getting some amount of sharpness in the frame is quite nice anyways.

Aaaand the below,

Mistake #4: Too little depth of field

Yup, this is a byproduct of shooting with small sensors cameras. I’ve gotten used to having pretty much everything in focus, all the time (which I like for the most part because I don’t shoot shallow dof that much). F1.4 on a 50mm on full frame/35mm film is really not a lot of depth of field though.

The other elephant in the room: Color casts

These shots (or rather, these scans I guess) turned out quite warm and brown. A lot more warm and brown than what I expected Vision3 500T to look like. It almost felt like Kodak Gold or something in some of these shots. I think it’s the combination of scanning corrections and the fd lenses leaning a bit warmer. I did notice that when I adapted them to Sony years ago. There’s also the overexposure. Maybe the expired film casts a bit of magenta in there as well, all combined to give a brown look.

Idk, will investigate further 🤷.

I’ve corrected these photos a bit just so it’s more to my liking (bring back some blues and greens from white balance). I like the photos on the cooler side, at least on these moody overcast days. That seems more… “representative” of reality.

So… what did I learn from all this?

SHOOT HIGHER SPEED FILM IN HEAVY OVERCAST DAYS YOU ABSOLUTE FACKING MORON! GET 800 OR AT LEAST 400 ISO! ALSO REMEMBER HYPERFOCAL DISTANCE NEXT TIME!

All things considered, I guess sooner or later I’ll make mistakes anyways. Just wasting one roll to learn a bunch of things actually seemed a bit better in the end. This was supposed to be just a test roll anyways.

With all that said, I really fucking love some of these technically travesty photos.

I really “felt” the look I was longing for peeking around in some of these shots, and it’s very addicting. It feels like what I wanted to create, all along. And yeah all these technical stuff makes thing quite a bit more involved and challenging, but damn does the result worth it in the end.

I mean… shit, should I just generative fill my mistakes away anyways?

Well, that was fun.

Can’t wait to show you what’s next,

Until next time,
Peter.

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I hope I can grow this thing, whatever this is, to something more sustainable, so I can have more time doing more art 🤷. Especially now that I’m back to the path of lighting money up on fire anytime I take a shot 🙏👌.

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