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

When you are using a older film camera, a lot of times there is no coupled light meter telling you what exposure you best use. So you have to purchase a external light meter. This can be expensive if you go for a new one. Luckily there are other options, like buying an older light meter for natural light, you can get one of those for about 5 euro, but you have to get used to reading such a meter. In this post I will explain how you do that.

In this example I use photos of a Russian light meter, the leningrad 4, although every light meter lay-out is a bit different, the general idea stays the same.

So the first thing to do is actually meter the light, this means most of the time you push a button on the side or just point the meter at the scene. A meter will move over the scale, as you see in the image above. This will give you a number, this corresponds to a number on the dial scale. The next thing is to match the number on the scale with the one you got from the reading. This will give you an aperture and shutter time on the other side of the dial. Most light meters will have a scale that shows all possible apertures with the appropriate shutter times. This way you choose whatever aperture or shutter time you want to use and don’t have to calculate the corresponding value.

The only thing we have not taken into account now is the asa/iso setting. As you can see, there is also a dial where you can set the iso. This also adjusts the times and the aperture ring again, to show you the appropriate times/apertures to shoot in the current circumstances with the film you have in your camera.

So it may seem a bit difficult at the beginning to use an older light meter, but once you get the hang of it, it’s actually quite fast to meter and set the correct settings on your camera.