A few months ago I came to be in possession of a film camera - a Canon FTb, to be exact. Prior to this, the only experience I'd had with film was with disposable cameras, and at that time I knew exactly nothing about how to take a decent picture. I'd never really considered film, but it would be a waste not to have a go at least. And, while I'm not going into the exact story of how I got hold of the Canon, I feel obliged to use it.

The first film I put into it was Velvia 100, and it turned out some nice shots. Then I went for Tri-X 400, which gave hit and miss results, but the hits were nice. The third roll - which is the subject of this post - was Provia 100, said to be a good all purpose colour film.

I had the pictures scanned and made into a DVD. Apparently it was scanned at around the equivalent of a 6MP camera, in TIFF format. However I want to show them as far as possible as they were shot and scanned, so these have as little post processing as possible. Many have none.

Here we are:

First two are from one of the main roads that runs down the centre of Nagoya.

I had to rotate this one quite a bit because I evidently had the camera at a bad angle when shooting.

The next shots are from Koshoji temple in Nagoya. This first one came out rather underexposed, a result of my inexperience with film. This one needed quite an adjustment in Photoshop.

The remaining shots from this temple are untouched in terms of exposure

I got the depth of field wrong on this one, but it handled the (quite considerable) dynamic range pretty nicely.

I have two lenses for the Canon: a 50 1.8 and a 70-150 zoom. Everything here was with the 50. It creates a lovely background blur wide open:

This is one of the plus points of film that people often point out. Being an analogue medium, whites don't clip. They just get whiter and whiter. The light-shadow range in this picture was enormous.

Another tough test for dynamic range, and another pretty pleasing result:

And this one in particular I like:

This was an instinctive shot. I was looking around with no particular shot in mind, and I saw this scene with the plane flying.

The next set is from a festival, digital pictures (from the Sigma DP3 Merrill) of which I've already posted in a previous entry

No press, please!

Finally, a "shot to finish off the roll" shot, but it came out quite nicely

I hope to put up more film-themed posts in the future. It's a lot of fun to shoot film (but I love digital as well).

Thanks for looking!