Playing with Film – Kitsap Documentary Family Photography

Shooting with film is such a different experience than shooting digital.  In a way, it involves having a lot of faith; faith in your equipment, faith in your processing lab (if you are sending it out), faith in your ability to make choices in film stock, rating and metering.  While you are constantly getting feedback from digital so that you can make adjustments in real time and go on shooting, film is a bit like that egg drop experiment everyone did in high school.  You can research and crunch numbers but at some point you just have to load the egg in the little contraction you made out of styrofoam, cardboard and tape. Then you toss it from the top of a ladder and hope you don’t find it cracked and oozing on the floor.

I’m still not totally comfortable with shooting film.  With each set of scans I get back I’m convinced I’m going to download and open the files to find nothing but tiny bits of eggshell and goo.  However, I have always been pleasantly surprised with each set of scans I get back. They aren’t always great but they are frequently better than I expect.

Below are some favorites from the last three rolls I sent into FIND. All of them shot with the Nikon F100 on Kodak Porta 400 film.