12 months on film - part two
April-June 2024
This is part two of a small series of posts about the 12 months on film photography project, which I took part in last year. If you haven't already, I suggest you start by reading part one before reading this post.
Our monthly day trips in April took us to Bologna and Livorno, which are both very photogenic cities.
My set up for April was the Fujifilm 200 together with my usual favorite camera, the Canon AE-1 Program.
I haven't shot a lot of Fujifilm, and after seeing the result of this roll, I have to say, that I am probably more of a Kodak girl. It’s not that I don’t like this film, I just don’t think it does anything, that Kodak Portra or Kodak Gold wouldn’t do better.
Somewhere between April and May I started getting behind on the project, and I didn’t manage to finish the roll within a month.
I didn’t want to waste good film (and money) just photographing random things in order to finish the roll and start on a new one, so I made the decision, that the most important thing would have to be to make as many nice photos as possible on each roll without necessarily following the single calendar months. As long as I began a new roll every month.
So I started using two cameras loaded with different film switching between the two, depending on what I was shooting. It was also a great chance to shoot color and black and white at the same time.
For May I went with another low ISO black and white film, which I hadn’t tried before: The Ilford FP4 Plus 125 along with my Contax TVS. I loaded the film in May, but I ended up shooting it over more than two months up until the beginning of July.
Although the roll contained lots of nice photos, I think some of them suffer a bit from too much contrast and too strong blacks, but it’s a film, which I wouldn’t mind trying out again, now that I know what to expect.
All photos were taken in Florence and mainly in the botanical garden. (The one place in Florence, which keeps inspiring me, every time I come back). We did do a day trip to Lucca in May, but for some reason I only captured the city with my phone.
For June I chose Kodak Ektar 100 and the Canon AE-1 Program. Most of this roll was shot during a weekend at the beach in Marina di Pietrasanta.
I have mixed feelings about this film. I like the beach shots very much, even if the muted tones aren’t really my personal style, but I realize that they were caused by the weather (cloudy with no sun) and not the film.
What I sadly discovered was, that Kodak Ektar 100 is not a good film for portraits, since light skin tones become way too red. If I had done a bit of research before loading the film, I would have known this, but unfortunately I didn’t, and I thus ended up wasting several frames on mainly bad portraits.
This makes it a difficult film for me to use, since I usually shoot a variety of subjects on the same roll including people, places and nature.
At least I have learned an important lesson from this roll of film, and for the future I will do some research before loading an unknown film into my camera, so that I know what to shoot (and not to shoot) with it.
Have you tried any of these three film stocks? I would love to know, what you think about them, and how you use them.
I will be back soon with part three of the 12 months on film project.
Lovely! Thank you for sharing!
Thank you for making part two. I never shot Ektar 100 on a cloudy day like you did, but it doesn’t look too bad imho. I agree with the skin tones though.
The black and white photo with the half open old gate is amazing. I have a thing for these „doors to the past“