Day 93
River Chelmer
Wednesday 21st September
I stopped off at the River Chelmer near Little Baddow on my way home, I'm drawn to water in my pictures at the moment. It was a lovely evening, still in shirt sleeves at the moment and the sun setting over the river was pretty magical. I parked next to what I had always thought was just another fishing lake, it turns out that it's actually a wild swimming lake; pretty amazing. I wonder whether it will still be open through the winter?
Now that I'm entering my second quarter of this project, I've been thinking about what have I learned so far. So today I'm looking at the technical side of things. I've tried out Fuji 400H which I'm not overly happy with on 35mm, I think it needs really good light and it may be a little too blue for me. I've also tried Kodak Portra 400 on medium format and that looks to be very promising. It has much less grain, the tones are so smooth and it's warmer than Fuji 400H. I need to shoot more rolls of the Kodak and Fuji films on medium format through the winter months to get an all round view.
I've also used a couple of black and white films, my old favourite Ilford HP5+ and Kodak Tri-X 400 but I'm still waiting for the Tri-X to come back from the lab, so no pearls of wisdom on that front just yet. I shot some Tri-X on medium format in Cornwall last week too, so it will be very interesting to see those results too.
I've very much enjoyed shooting on film, there's a sense of crafting a shot that I sometimes feel is lost with digital and it's changed the way I approach my digital pictures particularly for this type of handheld, more spontaneous photography. So I'm trying to capture the digital image in camera more in the way I see it than in how it needs to be post processed; that's not always possible when needing to hold highlight and shadow detail but it's working really well for me and changing the way I see shots. On 35mm, I feel more able to be creative with digital than film. I don't have the knowledge or feel for just how far I can push film at the moment and it makes me realise just how many hours I've invested in learning to develop digital images, the characteristics of the sensor on my Nikon D700 and just how far I can push and pull the images to get what I am looking for. I have less affinity with the D750, but it is growing on me. It's better at somethings than it's predecessor but it just doesn't seem to have quite the same tonality to me.
And so on to my Pentax 67. I haven't used it much for this project as it's too big and heavy to carry around on a daily basis, but when I do use it something special usually happens. It's an amazing photographic tool, I really connect with the subject through this camera. The image on the ground glass screen can't be rivalled by the best live-view or hybrid viewfinder on a digital camera; the subject is so completely absorbing and you can really see just how your image will be drawn.