First Roll of B&W Pics....

R8JimBob88

R8JimBob88

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James Stockton
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Well here we go, I went for a walk, a very long walk actually with Laura last weekend and I took my new F80 for some test shots!

First roll of B&W film ever, I used Ilford FP4+ 125. Unfortunately I am still bound to my 50mm f/1.8 untill funds allow me to purchase other one. What do we think? I know their nothing special but hell it was fun!

My favourite first -

#1
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#2

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#3
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#4
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#5
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#6
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#7
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It's a lot of fun trying to find shots that have a B&W 'feel'... especially when you're seeing the shot in colour!

Lovely shots - really like 1 and 3 (y)

Can we see the colour versions too... umm, wait a minute... scrap that! :LOL:
 
Did I develop these myself..... ermmm, no :( I had every intention of doing so but I thought I might be a wise idea to get them done at a lab first so that when I develop my own next time, I will least have something to compare my own to. Cant wait to get another roll going!
 
Looks like 3 shires head.....the sky is what lets them down...Ok so it was flat. Crop it out then so it isn't in the pictures when you take them, then you don't have a big, flat area of grey/white.

By keeping something solid as a background you can avoid the sky from burning out. Other than that, is is a matter of using an ND grad to hold the sky back - a 3 stop grad would have done it. Make you exposure calculation WITHOUT the grad on, stick to it, and then fit the filter....it is there to underexpose the sky for you but not the rest of the picture.

To use the ND grad, put it front of the lens, then STOP THE LENS DOWN using the depth of field preview....you can then see where the filter is working....jigle it about until you have it where you want it. It works best if you stop down to about f8 so you can see what is happening - shoot at whatever f you like, but the effect in the viewfinder is more noticable if you stop down a bit for previewing.
 
1 and 3 for me too - nothing wrong with FP4+ - it might be years old in design, but it works well, so why change.
 
Drag this one up from the dead... Liking them all but really like #3. Superb light and texture on the fence upright that's in focus. Really like the DOF in this one also.

Any chance of the EXIF?

:LOL:
 
Some really nice shots here.

The issue with the sky has been mentioned. Whilst an ND grad is the solution to this with colour (or digits) there is a far simpler answer with B&W.

NEVER (and I mean never) go out with B&W film in your camera without a set of colour correction filters in your pocket.

For most purposes all you need are yellow, orange and red ones. These give progressive darkening to their complimentary colours, in this case to the blue side of the colour wheel. Although modern B&W film is allegedly panchromatic it tends to higher sensitivity to the shorter wavelength light at the blue end which means that skies have an tendency to blown highlights at the best of times.

A yellow filter corrects this tendency. An orange one darkens it further and a red will give a dark brooding sky with a nice contrast with the clouds.

Of course the bluer the sky the better they work but you can get a very good idea what the effect will be by looking through the filter before you put it on the lens.

There is, of course a price to pay which is a hit of 3 stops for the red filter (less for the other 2) but the TTL metering will take care of that for you.
 
Alternatively you can burn the sky in the darkroom as long as there was some detail in the original neg?
 
A polarising filter will work too, but you need to take the angle-of-dangle into consideration when composing the shot.
 
Freester said:
Alternatively you can burn the sky in the darkroom as long as there was some detail in the original neg?
Click to expand...

Indeed you can. Using even a yellow filter will make it more likely that there is more detail in the neg to work with.
 
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