A Year in Photos

Photography, fiction, and personal essays form my three primary creative outlets. For this blog's first 18 months, I used it primarily for photography. As I've returned to creative writing, I'll use this blog for fiction, too. Sometimes, when reality needs to be discussed more than truth, I write personal essays.

This blog will continue to showcase as many above-average photos as I can muster. Hopefully my written work will be as good or better than the visual. Whichever drew you here -- photographs or fiction, I hope you enjoy both.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Microfilm, Motion Picture Film, and the Pentax H3V

About six months ago I won a 2,000-foot spool of Kodak 2383 on eBay. The film, however,  lacks any edge information, so I can't verify that it is 2383. It matches Kodak's description of the film's physical appearance quite well, though. The ISO is 1.6., which means that at f16 on a sunny day it needs a 1.6-second exposure. In bright light at f1.8, the shutter speed is around 1/30th of a second. At f2.8, 1/8th. That makes hand-holding the camera pretty difficult with this film.

But it yields a vintage look with nice grain. One limitation of this film, it has light damage, so the film HAS to be used in bright light or the images are unusable. Here is what an image taken in low light looks like:


What you're seeing along the edge is light damage caused by a pinhole leak in the film tin. The light has leaked in between the film's perforations. However, in bright light the new image wipes out the existing damage. Here's an example:


Fortunately, I lucked out and wound the film so that the light damage is along the top in the final images.

In addition to this microfilm, I also took some Kodak 250D with with me. 250D is a motion picture film that lends itself particularly well to monochrome work. The gray tones, when exposed correctly, are quite nice. Now, let me be clear that the images from the 250D roll were not exposed correctly. In fact, I only know how to expose the microfilm correctly because I accidentally screwed up the camera's settings. I thought the shutter speed indicator aligned with the cocked indicator, causing all my microfilm images to be perfectly exposed and all my 250D images to be MASSIVELY overexposed. It's complicated, just trust me. So here are some images from the microfilm roll.














You can see the vintage, high-contrast look. It's a nice film for selected uses, but not for action photography.

The 250 D results were less evenly toned and tended to all be high-key. In fact, only two of the 250D shots turned out at all.



2 comments:

  1. Hey..!

    this is a great information and pictures about Microfilm, but its too sort. please update more information on this blog.

    Thanks for!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm glad to help. Some other entries talk about using microfilm. There are some more posts coming up, too, about using microfilm. I have about 1,800 feet of the stuff, so there's plenty to come.

      Delete