Keepers

Film is said to be expensive! Might well be, if you don’t factor in the recurring cost of a digital camera (after all you ‘have to’ renew at least every 3 years to be up to the challenge!).

Or not?

Film cameras, unless you go for a Leica or the Nikon F6 which are still produced new, range from peanuts to moderately affordable. My Praktica, a thoroughly great camera cost 35€, including the 50mm lens and postage! The Spotmatic SP1000 was 20€!

A truly great, very clean and properly maintained Nikon F2 would be around 250€. A good Olympus XA2 can be had for around 40€. And even a very nice Leica IIIa like Oskar is less than 300€!

Not in the ballpark of digital cameras at all. So we can manage the running expense of film I guess. At least if we develop and scan at home. It’s a chore but it makes for good time to write a silly blog post about film photography and the keepers on a roll.

Yes, let’s get back to those keepers.

With digital, people tend to ‘spray and pray’. Take lots of photos and expect some to be OK. At the end of the day you are sitting in front of your computer, trying to sift through dozens if not hundreds of photos.

That’s fine by me if you like that!

As a silly old film shooter I try to think before hitting the shutter button. I look at a scene and try to imagine how I’d like it to look in the final photo.

Then I ask myself: “Do I really want that photo?” More often than not the answer is ‘No’. So I stroll along looking for the next challenge.

I don’t want to ‘make the photo’ in photoshop! A photo is made in the camera. It’s OK or not from the start. All I do, not working in a real darkroom as I should, is adjust the contrast, dodge and burn a bit, and I have to admit that I might even crop a bit. All photos are not perfect after all.

So out of a costly roll of film, how many keepers can I expect?

I went through my negatives folder from 2016 and chose a sheet more or less at random. I viewed the negatives and re-scanned the best at optimal resolution. How many did stand the test?

Eleven photos from a roll of 36 made the cut. Not too bad. The rest are not useless, well most of them apart from a couple shaky ones and one where I hit the shutter by mistake. But they are simply not really good. Though you should never throw them out as I said HERE!

In this post I show the keepers from a roll of Ilford HP5, shot in my now sadly deceased Ricoh GR1. Hope you liked them.

For the technically inclined, all negatives are scanned on a Plustek Opticfilm 8100 using Silverfast. I ‘developed’ them in Apple Photos and Picktorial like I said HERE. As you can see I prefer them well done with a lot of contrast! And Grain…..

Thanks for stopping by!