Last week I finally got my first roll of film back – it wasn’t the developing that took time (in fact, it was a really quick turnaround) but just simply completing the roll in the first place. Spring wasn’t a good time to start… it’s the summer greens and Velvia I dreamed about. Except that now the summer greens are here and I’m just taking flower pictures, so on a monthly basis I’m not always taking one film roll worth of landscape pictures with digital, either. But now I have Velvia in the camera and I dream of green!
The biggest problem I had with the slides was to find the light table. I had packed all my film stuff in a box in the storage room and of course it was furthest back, so I very nearly had to turn the room upside down until I got to it! Having been doing digital such a long time, it was such a pleasure to be looking at new pictures which were complete as they came. I mean, with digital you upload the RAWs to the computer and then have to start adjusting WB and other settings before the picture pops. It kind of dilutes the experience. It’s not that the pictures are worse, but the first impression definitely is. The slide on the light table is the final product – and even when you notice that the exposure or colours aren’t quite what they should be, there’s nothing you can do to it anyway, LOL! What you see is what you get. But of course, the slides can be scanned and the colours can be fixed in the digital file, which is what I had to do with some of these. I used the 40D and macro lens to digitise the slides and I’m actually pretty happy with the result, the film scanner I used to use didn’t give me anything better as I recall. If I need a bigger file size, I can ”scan” the slide in two parts and stitch them. But for now, I didn’t feel the need for it so I even included the perforation.
As for the exposures, it seems like I have a slight tendency to underexpose. I think I also had it to some degree back when I was mainly doing film, but it’s probably worse now when I’ve forgotten how film behaves. Need to re-learn the latitude and dial in +1/3 stops, because not one of the slides were overexposed! But having mentioned the latitude, that’s the biggest handicap with slides as I see it. Just trying to find the correct exposure for bright clouds and dark forest is hard enough, take for example the top left slide. I swear the exposure is as close to correct as it gets, the cloud is just on the right side of hot but I still lost the shadows in the trees. There’s no shadow fill or curve adjustment that will get them back! I’m not complaining though, just comparing. Film is fun!