My First Roll of Film
When I was in high school, I took a photography class, and one of our assignments was to turn a shoebox into a camera. We used light sensitive film paper and electrical tape to makeshift our “camera.” The size of the hole we poked with our pencil correlated to our aperture. The length of time we had the electrical tape pulled back to expose the film to light was our shutter speed. And the light sensitive paper was of course, the ISO. That was the extent of all of my knowledge when it came to authentic film until I started my job at Reformed Film Lab.
My new boss handed me a canon film camera, 3 rolls of Fuji 400 film, and instructed me to learn how to shoot film over the weekend. Barely knowing how to work the camera and with a busy weekend, I was nervous that no images would turn out. Saturday morning I prepared for a tea party I was hosting at my house. My friends became my first victims, along with the decor. Shooting film caused me to slow down and be more deliberate about my composition. Afterall, I only had a maximum of 36 images for each roll. The images from my tea party had a sort of blue haze on each images. I can only assume that is because of the indoor lighting. Maybe I will learn about using flash with film to mitigate that next time.
That evening I was scheduled to photograph a proposal in St. Augustine, Florida. Of course I used my digital camera to make sure I captured the proposal perfectly. But once we were taking portraits I asked if they would be open to taking a few images with film, and they said YES (so did Savannah when Dawson popped the question, in case you were wondering)! I think these were the best out of all the images. We were in a shaded area so the lighting was even, and of course couples always make the cutest photos!
I worked sunday at the jewelry store. Sunday evening I went out with my sister to practice more with film. Some of the images were cute, some were as goofy as they are (also cute), and most underexposed. The metering system on a film camera was trying to find a middle ground between the bright, overexposed background and the subjects. This resulted in underexposed subjects. My boss suggested next time to get close to my subjects and properly expose them without the background in frame, and then to back up and compose my shot with the same settings.
With one last image left on the roll, I asked my sister to take a photo of me to commemorate the moment. Once she did, I realized there was still another image… So I got a goofy shot of my sister and that concluded my first roll of film!
