Experiments with film...

With digital photography on an SLR, it's so easy to just snap away and check that your settings are correct by looking back at the photos as you go… But obviously with film you can't rely on that.

Now that I've been using my digital SLR for almost a year, I roughly know what exposure time and ISO to use when dealing with different types of lighting so I hoped it was accurate when I was shooting on the F100 as I didn't want to underexpose or totally burn out the film.

When using the camera I really stopped to make sure everything was right, like never before. I fussed over the composition for ages before pressing the shutter, and really thought about what was actually in shot, because unlike using a digital camera, you've only got a certain amount of photos you can take. It's not 'free' like it is on a DSLR to snap away, and I wanted to try to get it right in the camera!

I think from using film it will make me more aware of the composition of my photography when shooting digitally too. I'll try to take more time to think about what I'm shooting, how to frame it in the shot, and the look generally. Although I like to think I already do, I know that in post production I can always straighten up the shot, crop it or photoshop things out, and I think it would be really bad practice to 'rely' on that too much... or at all.

I was so nervous to get them developed, it's so exciting wondering how they'll look and whether they will be I you imagined they would come out when you clicked the shutter!

They've come out okay, quite a lot of them are a bit underexposed, the ISO was too low on most of them and they've come out a bit wider above and to the right hand side than I thought I'd allowed, but I'm happy enough as it was my first 'experiment'! For all of these photos I'm sharing, I used my 35mm f1.8 lens and haven't cropped or edited the photographs in any way at all... apart from the watermark!

I've put a roll of black and white film in the camera for my next try, so I'll share the results of those when I get them developed! I'm going to try and re-shoot some of the photos below with a higher ISO and longer exposures so you'll probably see some similar shots in the next F100 blog.

I love studying and shooting portrait photography more than anything, so I'm going to do as many as I can on the next roll.

Anyway, here are my favourites!

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