Olympus Pen EE-S, Reminiscing

Half Frames: Film photography favorites, image making with an Olympus Pen EE-S, the hues, light, and color of the evening on expired film.

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The most telling effects of using expired film are decreased sensitivity and contrast, increased grain, and color shifts. Color shifts may be subtle or extreme, depending on both age and storage conditions. Different emulsions may shift in different ways, some moving toward the blue and others toward the magenta or the yellow, because different dyes age differently.

In many cases, with or without color shifts, saturation will be reduced. This can range from slightly muted colors to extreme desaturation bordering on selective color. With all films, you can get a variety of unevenness - mottling or spotting, streaking, inconsistent grain, and so on.

Olympus Pen EE-S

The older you go in terms of the expiration date, the more factors you need to consider. In addition to the expected fogging of the film, you’ll want to be aware of the required developing processes. Currently, it’s no longer possible to develop Kodachrome (K-12 or K-14 processes), and may not be possible to develop color films designed for other defunct methods, such as the C-22 negative and the E-2, E-3, or E-4 transparency processes, since the chemicals no longer exist.

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Found Slides, Minimalist

Vintage color film slides from the '80s, found, scanned, and post-processed for web publishing.

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Minimalism, in visual arts, music, and other mediums, is a style that uses the minimum of design elements. The movement emerged in New York in the early 1960s as artists moved toward geometric abstraction in painting and sculpture.

While some appreciate the openness of this idea, embracing the freedom of interpretation, others take the opposite stance, despising the lack of direction or subject matter. In photography, however, where a photo represents a moment in time and place, minimalism is instead used to enhance the impact of the image.

The rule? Keep it simple. Pick the strongest element of the shot, focus on what catches and engages the eye, and use the leading line and negative space to accentuate its prominence. Use the rule of thirds to help you compose. Work on a good depth of field to draw the eye to the composition's focus. Go for distinct textures and colors, get the light just right, and work from a vantage point that will put all these in perspective.

Tell a story, bring people and figures into the context of your composition, and convey a scene or event using reduced subject matter, colors, and shapes. Post-processing your shots should be reasonably straightforward as you already have a good notion of what you want with simple but dramatic images. Consider something surreal, use the artist in you to create a piece of art instead, or just stay true to life and process in its utmost simplicity.

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Nokia Lumia 720, Huffy Is A Red Bicycle

Mobile Photography: Image making with a Nokia Lumia 720, sights and scenes, converted to black-and-white.

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If you shoot in JPEG and want to create images in black-and-white, the advice is still to shoot in color and do the conversion to black-and-white in post-processing. By doing so you are preserving all the color information of the image, and when you do the conversion on a non-destructive image editor, you can always go back to the original image any time you want to or you can re-edit the images.

Black-and-white images taken off the camera setting or converted in-camera tend to be rather flat and may look lifeless. This is where the advantage of editing images in post-processing is. I use Olympus Viewer 3 (OV3) as my image management and editing software which I find is adequate enough for all my editing and black-and-white post-processing needs.

If you have yet to go into post-processing, learn more about your camera's setting for black-and-white conversion, and you still might end up with a few good black-and-white images, but that's all that you can do with it. Soon enough you will have the urge to do the conversion yourself on installed image editors and this is where you will have all the look and feel of your final images.

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LOMO Holga 120Pan, Trying To Get It Right I

Analog Diary: A street shoot, trying to get it right with the Holga 120Pan, and a roll of expired Fujifilm Pro 160-S.

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The Holga 120-Pan, similar to its sibling Holga 120-GN, is a very lightweight simplistic camera that comes in a plastic body that is susceptible to light leaks, a 90mm optical lens, a single shutter speed of 1/100th second, and two aperture settings, f/8, and f/11. The Holga 120 Pan, however, takes 60x120mm panoramic images on 120 format color or B&W film, which is twice as wide as the square 6x6 format.

Focusing is adjustable to 4 zones - portrait, small group, big group, and infinity. Interestingly, the camera is fitted with a clear-line viewfinder fixed to the top plate and a spirit level embedded within the top plate towards the left of the top plate.

Holga 120-Pan

The film back, with the red film frame count window set for 12 and 16 (glued fixed) frames is clearly from the GN model, the 120-Pan can only take up to 6 shots per 120 film roll. In use, with nothing much by manual control or other adjustments, all you have to do is set the camera level and steady before pressing the shutter.

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Olympus Pen EE-S, Catching The Light

Half Frames: Film photography favorites, image making with an Olympus Pen EE-S, catching lights on a roll of expired film.

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How do you set up an expired film to catch the light? Plenty of theories here, nothing hard and fast, and a warning not to get taken in by all and what you read, everybody has their own opinion. It boils down to the fact that each individual roll of film will degrade differently from others even if they are from the same production batch.

A lot will depend on how these films have been stored. Film stored cold, especially frozen, tends to degrade much more slowly. Color films stored like this will keep their dyes from deteriorating, and are often just as good, or almost as good, as a fresh roll.

Olympus Pen EE-S

Heat, of course, is the film’s worst enemy. If you buy in bulk, you might want to sacrifice a roll for testing. If you buy loose or single items and cannot determine how the film was stored, you really won’t know until you put it in your camera and shoot it. Generally, you may just want to set the film ISO speed a stop or two slower than specified and bracket your shots with exposure compensation.

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