What's happened here? (Noob help)

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Steve
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Hi, first of all this photograph was taken on a bright sunny day, with my trusty 35mm Film SLR. All photo's that i have taken with this camera have been perfect, and photo's taken 5 minutes after this one turned out fine too.
It was shot using Kodak Colour 200 ISO, but i have used 2 lots of the same roll of film and all photo's have been fine, so i am pretty sure the film is okay.

Now at Noob's first site i would say its underexposure, but i know that my camera meter told me the exposure was fine. So it's just a puzzle for me. Could i have been metering at the wrong spot, and got a misread from the meter? I don't know if that is even possible as i am literally a mega noob just starting out with SLR's.
Could this be an error in development? I had the roll developed at my local Kodak store and all other photo's are fine on this roll.

I realise this thread may belong in the film section, but i don't think its a film related error, that's why it is in general, if any admins disagree then please move it for me :)

So here is the culprit:
4897902819_1efb52ba4e_z.jpg


Steve.
 
I'm not sure, it could be the lab cocked up, but the image you've posted is very grainy for one that was shot @ISO 200
 
iancandler said:
I'm not sure, it could be the lab cocked up, but the image you've posted is very grainy for one that was shot @ISO 200
Click to expand...

That might be down to my scanner degrading a lot of the quality.


mr_pants said:
Did you meter off the sky, leading to underexposure?
Click to expand...

I am uncertain, i think that's probably what i did but it was a couple of weeks ago and i can't really remember.
 
Steve, I strongly doubt if its a metering error. If the meter was reading off the sky, the sky would have come out bright, clear, and most importantly, clean.
Given that your skyline is bang in the middle, the centre spot must have been on the horizon and not on the sky
Further, if the sun was behind you, and the sky was clear blue ( as it seems from the photo), the sky and the brightly lit field should have been, 2 stops, at best 3 stops apart. A film can handle 5 stops easily, so it shouldn't have been that bad.
You dont say what SLR it was, but if it was anything from the 80s or later, the metering will be centre weighted, with more emphasis on the foregound. Again, if the centre spot was on the horizon, the exposure should have been fine. ( unless yours have a spot facility and AEL and both the buttons got pressed at the same time.)
I have had this before; and it was always the labs fault. Sometimes it did this for randon frames, and at least once for the whole film ( it was Tesco). So I would bet a few penny thats its the fault of the lab. You could check the negative to see how light it is, but I had found that its the development rather than printing which created the problem in my rolls.
Ujjwal
 
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I definitely think the first thing you should do is examine the negative for exposure problems - see if the negative is unusually dense or thin.

Phil
 
Thanks for the input guys, i am still learning about stops and things so i don't have much of a clue about it all, i'm still trying to experiment with aperture settings to see what kind of outcomes i can get.

Here is a badly taken photograph of the culprit negative:
4900378911_88a00762ca_z.jpg

I don't know if that will help at all? I don't know how to identify a dense/thin negative.

The camera i used is a Centon K100. It is a remake of the well known Pentax K1000, which came out in '83 from what i can muster up on wikipedia. So the camera is definitely post 1980's.

Steve.
 
Steve, one way to judge density is to put it on a newspaper, and trying to read the paper. If you can just about read it, the density is right. But it takes experience to be able to do it - something I sadly lack. I often try to compare the offending negative with another similar shot, and if its way off, you can see that its either too dark - overexposed or too light - underexposed.
 
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