Time for more photos!
First up, some shots from a roll of Ilford FP4, taken with the Minolta XRT Super with the 50/1.4:
This is out my room window. I shoot this with the lead-in of every roll I load in my room. It makes for a quick assessment of the film / camera whatever. Since I see it multiple times a day, it's easy for me to evaluate, kinda like using songs you know really well to audition audio gear.
Lake Merritt:
This little guy didn't get very far...
Only in Berkeley:
The roll of Film Photography Project Jiangshi 400 got me crossways with the Yashica Model M's weird and error-intolerant film advance and rewind mechanism. I forgot that it was a 24-exposure roll, so I stripped the film out of the canister. Oops. And then, while showing the very nice young woman at the camera store how the film back release works, I managed to pop the latch. Which was enough to fog several images, mostly from a "ride BART at rush hour and take one shot per station as the commuters get on" little project I tried.
Only one of those shots was usable:
On a trip to the City, I got really into textures, and how they'd look in B&W. It was midday on a very bright day, and with that and the water scattering the light, and my still learning the camera, and Jangshi's rumored exposure pickiness, these are overexposed by about 1/8 stop. (At least that's what looked right to me when I was playing with exposure correction in GIMP.) The corrected images (-.125 exposure, +.001 blackness) look better, but you can still see the texture in the mooring lines even in these:
Still, the Yashica is a neat camera that takes great pictures. If I don't screw up too badly... compare the last image to this version, with the horizon straightened, and exposure & blackness level corrected by eye as described above:
Even at email resolution, that's good enough to ride the river with, I'd say.
The Film Photography Project films are fun, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what "The Mummy" 400 does, I'm thinking that HP5+ and/or Tri-X are still gonna be the go-tos, unless the roll of FPP's Derev Pan 400 that I'm running through ends up kicking lots of arse. Which it might... it seems to have a pretty good rep online. And, at 9.99 / 36, there's no price penalty.
Next up in the film rotation will be one of the 6 36-shot rolls of expired-but-cold-stored Kentmere 100 that I got for 5 bucks a roll on the List of the Craigs. Probably in one of the Minoltas... I'm still learning the Light Value exposure system on the Yashica, plus the ISO dial is unreadable; I've got it set at 400 because that's the last number on the dial, and I can tell it's a number even though I can't actually read it. I've read that the Kentmere works well at ISO 200, which I can for sure figure out on the Yashica, so that might be my first experiment in pushing film. Which I've always been curious about, but have never tried. (Note to self: ask photokid about this.)
--Shannon