Tales on Film

First of all let me wish you all a happy 2012. As one of my New year resolutions, I decided that I will keep on posting interesting things about film photography, but I can’t keep up the rate I did last year until september. It’s just not possible to combine this blog on that intensity with all with my work and shooting. However I will not let the blog die. So to show that I’m still committed to posting, here is the first post for 2012.

A little while ago, I was playing around with the Diana F+ and got the idea to try and see if it’s possible to fire a pocketwizard (wireless flash trigger) with the Diana. After some testing and with the little hotshoe flash accessory that came with my Diana F+, it turned out to work. I loaded some film in the camera and went on to do some light tests.

Thanks to the internet I knew that the F+ has a diafragma of about f11 and that the shutter time varies between 1/100 and 1/60 of a second. That made that I had to put my studioflashes for those conditions, I used the old school method of a light meter and made sure I used the lower end of all settings. So I measured for f8 at 1/60 of a second on iso 400 because I was using Kodak Portra 400VC. It was an experiment, and boy was I happy when I saw the photos.

It even delivers some interesting results when you start using double exposures and flashes, just remember to adjust your settings.

So it’s perfectly possible to use a Diana F+ for studio photography. There are some catches however, first of all, the Diana F+ has no real focus, so that means unless you are using a lint meter your shots are going to be a bit soft like the photos above. The second problem is that because you are not working with a through the lens viewfinder and you don’t exactly see what you are framing and that means you’ll get some pictures like the one above, where the head is cut off. So it is possible to use a Diana F+ with off camera flash and there for in a studio environment, I would not recommend it

After the previous article about Kodak Portra 160VC, I have to write one about 400VC too. Since October 2011, this film isn’t made anymore, it has been replaced by the Portra 400. As with the portra 160VC the VC stands for Vivid Color, so the color should be more saturated.

The film is optimized to use under cloudy condition and inside with natural light.

At dusk and dawn, the film gets a very blueish cast, but I do like the colors.

At night, the film is acting pretty decent with the artificial lights. Even at this time, there isn’t a lot of noise to be seen

Overall I like this film, it’s fast enough to use in darker situations, but it doesn’t have a lot of noise. The colors are nice and nicely saturated. I don’t use the film a lot, but it’s a great overall film

I noticed in the search results of this site, that there is a huge interest in the different film types you can find. I’m only reviewing the film I have used till now and keep in mind that these are my personal opinions