A few months I really got into film photography. Maybe it was my reignited interest in my dad's old cameras, or the sudden rise of film photography, or perhaps it was the existential jokes Jason makes on his YouTube channel: Grainydays. I got borderline obsessed with the Nikon F3, a camera my dad owned since even before I was born. As for me, I started with the humble Kellogg Cam (this will probably make its debut on this blog at some point, you just have to wait) I just needed to find out what the whole fuss about film was. Sure, I've heard the old 'Film makes you think!' argument, but how much?
I guess my curiosity got the best of me when I decided to finally get myself some film rolls from the only shop in Qatar where you can actually find them: Khalifa Art Center. Before leaving for the store, as if I got some sort of godly premonition, I decided to look for something in my dad's old camera bag. Lo and behold, there they were, 3 boxes of Kodak Colorplus which expired in 2009. Only God knows how I got this lucky.
I decided to load up the F3 with one roll. Took it out to take some photos, only to find out that the rewind knob didn't turn with every crank, ie. I'd loaded it incorrectly. Back to square one, I decided to salvage the situation. I went to the bathroom and reloaded the film in pitch black, finally getting it right this time. I make it look simple here, but considering that I could have potentially destroyed the film entirely, this was more stressful than it seems, especially in the dark. Still, I lost a few exposures in the process, and the first photo turned out to be this.
A few days later, I finally took it out. I took these photos, a stop over-exposed to account for the decade-old expiry of the film. All these photos were taken near Souq Waqif.
Now, this begs the question: would I recommend it?
Like everything in life, this really depends on what you want. Shooting expired film can be adventurous, you don't know what you could get, maybe the film was stored well, maybe it wasn't. This definitely isn't for the faint of heart, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone trying to shoot film for professional work.
Here's something important: remember to over-expose your photos by one stop with every decade of expiry. In my case, I over-exposed my photos by one stop because my film had expired around a decade ago.
I am glad I used expired film on a camera I hadn't used before, using this film was a really cheap way for me to test out if everything on the camera side of things works: the on-camera lightmeter seems to be working just fine.
There's definitely a lot of color shifting here in these shots and a lot of the scans had a magenta tint to them. In fact, even the film itself after development had a pretty nasty green discoloration, so this was expected. Somehow, for a speed 200 film, there is noticeable grain too. Still, for my first go at film photography, I'm not too disappointed. I definitely need to get used to spot-metering on film, considering I can't really salvage anything from grainy shadows in post.
I enjoyed the process of shooting film. Probably the first thing I noticed about myself was how I had to spend more time thinking of my composition and my settings before I hit the shutter button; this made me more active while taking photos, and definitely more careful. So maybe the whole 'film makes you think' has some meaning to it. I'll be honest, I definitely 'chimped' a few times in the start only to see a black camera back, guilty. While film definitely forces you to slow down, it isn't something you need to do that, just discipline to not be trigger happy on your digital camera will do just fine. As for me, I think I'll stick around and shoot some more film now. After getting this film developed, I've decided to throw myself into the deep end of film investment by getting some Portra 800, I'll be back with updates on that soon.
Beautiful read