My first 2 rolls of film!!

[MindofMel]

First off, thanks for you patients over the past few weeks with my 'noob' questions.

Got my film dev'd @ jessops to CD. Some are over-exposed etc but I love em all. First roll love me thinks. Wierd tho as I did as the camera metered in terms of Shutter Speed, so not sure why they blew out the sea etc. Have some Illford XP2 BW and Portra 160 NC coming - so those should yield more consistent results!

Thanks for looking.

Nikon f301. 50mm f1.8 .Fuji 800 Superia

Nikon f301. 50mm f1.8. Expired '02 TMAX 400 BW C41

 

[lawrie29]

1, 3 and 6 are all good in my eyes! They stand out.
Number one looks like its come from the inside of a Ska album,
3 an advert for sunglasses (or condoms, come to that)
and the last looks like the start of a Stag do that is about to go horribly wrong in a channel four short film.

 

[freecom2]

First one certainly stands out to me; but great to see/hear you are enjoying it, getting my first roll back 9 months ago was a lovely experience.

 

[TheBigYin]

Certainly looks like you were enjoying your day out with the camera.

As far as why a couple of the B&W's are a bit burned, bear in mind that the f301 probably has centre weighted metering (as far as I can remember) which won't be quite as intelligent as the metering in your d300. From what I can remember, they pretty much meter for anything in the larger circle on the viewfinder screen. The 2 shots that have the sky burned have a midtone or darker area covering a large proportion of this section. Centre weighted back in the day generally meant "metering from a big spot in the middle" rather than the modern "metering from all the frame, even the outer edges, but giving greater precedence to the central area".

Top and bottom of all this is, it's just a matter of getting used to how the camera meters and working with it. They're older cameras, and not so clever as new ones, so we have to do the thinking instead

 

[Kev M]

A good first couple of rolls Mel. Mark is most likeley right about the over exposure but you might find that if they were wet printed you could get some of the detail back. You'll probably find that some of it was lost at the scanning stage.

 

[AJQS]

A good first couple of rolls Mel. Mark is most likeley right about the over exposure but you might find that if they were wet printed you could get some of the detail back. You'll probably find that some of it was lost at the scanning stage.

I'd say by the looks of it this is quite likely, none are really blown out, theres just a lack of definition there. Perhaps a yellow or orange filter would have helped there..

 

[TheBigYin]

Looking a little more closely, and after swapping from my normal TP Grey to the TP Black and TP White themes, it looks like the only bit that's really blown is the chap in #5's forehead. Really the skies are more washed out, rather than blown, and as Alan says, a yellow or maybe orange filter could well have kept some details. When I'm shooting B&W, the only times I'll remove the yellow filter are 1) after dark/indoors and 2) to fit another, even more contrasty filter.

I do still think that there may be a little learning curve to climb with the metering though, it's all part of getting used to a new camera tbh though. And, as Kev said, I'm pretty sure that wet printing would definitely get more out of the negs, as would a properly optimised scan, as opposed to the machine scan from Jessops minilab machine.

 

[MindofMel]

Hi all,

thanks for the critique, advice and feedback

will go and get myself a yellow filter from jessops today!

 

[s162216]

I wouldn't bother getting filters from Jessops, their massively overpriced compared to what you can get them at online.

If you look on ebay there are usually loads of decent yellow filters for quite good prices or if you want a very good new one then you can get a Hoya Yellow K2 HMC for about £20 or so. A standard non HMC version is much cheaper though and does the same job though, the coatings are just not quite as good.