More film shots

So since August (?) I’ve been taken shots on two cameras – a Voigtlander Bessa R4M and Horseman Convertible which I picked up in *checks notes* August…

Both cameras work fairly well for me. The R4M is small, light and mechanical. It uses a battery only for the light meter. The Horseman is a compact-ish medium format camera. Despite only being made with a 65mm f5.6 lens (which should be ~23mm in 35mm full frame), it apparently takes anything that is compatible with a graflok (graflex?) 23 back. This means it can take film backs that shoot in 6×9 or 6×7 and having multiple film backs is handy if I want to shoot the same scene with different film stocks. It’s just a matter swapping them out.

So I ended up shooting a fair amount of film since August, seven in 35mm and eight in 120. And I posted them off to Film Never Die, since they can process the Mr Negative rolls that were mixed in with the others. And now they have sent me back all of the scans.

Lets review the best shots from each. First the 35mm shots

Mr Negative 700S

This roll was shot over my trip to Hobart in October. It’s a nice film stock when shot at 800. However, there was some kind of weird light leak or red smear. And I have no idea where this appeared from.

Other shots from another roll of 700S earlier in the year, also had some weird light leak issues. I don’t know what these red smears might be. These were shot between March to May.

Mr Negative Daylight Robbery

These are other shots I did around Hobart. There more of these light smears, there’s even drops of red in the shots that worked out okay. Still not certain about what happened, whether its a fault in the film itself, its loading into the cannister, the cannister itself or when the lab went to develop it.

Kodak Portra 400

Classic portra, most of these were shot around September and my birthday. Also no weird red smears.

Harman Phoenix II

Harman Phoenix II is a pretty good film stock. Sure you gotta shoot it on a clear day, but there’s strong blues and fresh reds. Things are subdued just enough to give it that vintage, faded memory feel. It’s a real nice set of colours

Ilford HP5+

As usual HP5+ is something you can set a watch to. If there’s not other film stock around, you can shoot with this. Who cares about colour when you have nice tone, contrast and shadow. These shots are a mix of street photography around Canberra and Sydney and the Other Worlds Zine Fair.

Medium Format Film

Now on to the medium format film. All of these were shot on my Horseman Convertible. I’ve posted about this camera previously. But if you’re not clicking that link here’s a quick recap: This is a camera which doesn’t have a focusing viewfinder, so I’m using the Mamiya Press viewfinder to frame my shots. All of the focusing is through zone focusing, where the f-stop setting can give you a bit of flexibility with estimating what’s going to be in focus. It’s an expensive venture to try with film photography, but on a bright enough day and a lightmeter, you should be able to get things shot okay.

I’ve got three film backs to this camera now – 2 6×7 and a 6×9. What’s good is that if you’re not excited to run out the film in the film back, you can take two backs, load different film in them and swap them on the camera, if you want the same shot in two different film stocks.

Kodak Portra 400

If you’ve managed to pick up a medium format camera, and you want to shoot in colour, you’re probably picking Portra 400. And you’ll only gently weep when you look at your bank account, instead of hitting rockbottom purchasing Ektachrome in this economy. It’s pretty much the standard over what you expect for colour film.

Harman Phoenix II

I don’t need to repeat what I’ve said about Harman Phoenix, it’s an economical film stock for bright sunny days. That said, I might try out Kodak Gold at some point.

Ilform HP5+

Now there’s a thing with these camera film backs. There’s a little switch on the that you need to trip in order to release the film winder for the next frame. There’s an advantage to this, you can create double exposures, which is not a feature on a lot of film cameras.

The disadvantage is that if you forget to advance the film, you’ve ruined two shots. Congratulations. There was a few shots like the one above.

Ilford XP2

These were part of a photowalk way back in August. Seems fitting that the earliest are posted last. I’m not a big fan of XP2 and I only use it when there’s no HP5 to be had.

I’m working on other things while I have time off my actual job and round out the final posts for this year. More shots very soon