Well it's been a LONG time since the last post. Over a year in fact. During that time I have done photos at weddings, photos on holiday, photos of airshows, but only in the last couple of weeks have I actually done any creative photography, and for that I have some old technology to thank. Film. I'd started a return to film for some of my photography - mostly high speed black and white stuff like the lovely Ilford Delta 3200 - a few months back, when I spotted a good condition EOS 3 on one of the used equipment sites (probably Ffordes though it may have been Mifsuds) and decided to treat myself to what was my absolute dream camera all through the latter part of the 90s. I've not been disappointed and it's a beautiful piece of kit, but that's for another day. I then ended up at Jessops in the Trafford centre buying film to put in it. £60 later I was the proud owner of 5 rolls of Kodak Portra, a couple of Sensia process paid slide films, a Velvia, a Delta 3200, and a couple of rolls of 120 Velvia and Provia to put through my Halina TLR. Most of it is still in the fridge if I'm honest (which is more than I could say of Jessops, where film has been consigned to a wooden drawer full of a hotch potch collection of plastic bags and multipacks beneath the counter), but I have been through a few films lately.
Like many people I suspect, I've had a few rolls of exposed film kicking around in the bottom of a bag for a while, and some still sat in the last camera I used them in, partly exposed and abandoned. Some of them dated from at least five or six years ago, some black and white, some colour slide, one infrared black and white that I was sure had been spoiled by the way I changed the film in shade instead of complete darkness, not fully understanding the process of how to use it at the time. I checked around for a place that still understood infrared film (not quite trusting Tesco or Jessops...) and found Metro Imaging in London, where the very helpful Tony reassured me that he knew exactly what needed to be done, but warned that really, it did need to have been handled in complete darkness. Hedging my bets I elected process and same-size contact sheet and didn't expect much from it, so imagine my surprise when it turned up and pretty much every frame had come out, some complete with the trademark white leaves and black skies of infrared photography.
Inspired by the unexpected success I have since bought some more infrared film (the choice is much more limited these days) by a company called 'Efke', then discovered that in order to shoot it I needed a proper infrared filter instead of just a red like the Kodak stuff of the past, so I've also bought one of those. Next I discovered that I could do the same thing on my DSLR (to an extent) and on my compact so the next accessory was a lens adapter for my Canon G5 to allow me to fit the IR filter to that, and hopefully get instant results. Finally at lunchtime today I got chance to take out the oldest of all my SLRs - my dad's old Pentax ME with a broken shutter button - and shot 15 shots (tripod mounted, remote release, f/16, exposures ranging from 0.5 to 8 seconds) of a power station across a field containing horses. In my imagination, the power station looks dark and foreboding, the grass is white, the dry grass in the adjoining field probably darker, the sky a light grey flecked with streaks of jet black, and the horses look ... perfectly normal. Hint - when shooting infrared, seek out animals in some of your shots. Cows for example are a stereotypical IR subject, as they look entirely unchanged and unconcerned about the white foliage they're chewing on.
So the lesson for me from this whole thing. If you're low on inspiration, go old skool, dig out those unprocessed films from your past, and get them sent off.
Oh, and if you put film in your camera, finish it and get it processed, or even just finish it, wind it back, and keep it somewhere cool and dark. Of all the films I've had processed, the only ones that really showed any image quality problems at all were the ones I left part-used for years. In those ones, the old frames, left wrapped around the take-up spool for years, had faded and lost most of their interest. By contrast (scuse the pun) the ones that were older than these, same film type, but left would back into their casings, in their plastic tubs, in a darkened bag in the wardrobe, came out pretty much fine.
