There WILL be school fees shooting film...

And that is OK because that is all part of the fun!

A film capture of the Kareedouw Dutch Reformed Church

So one of my first outings with my new (to me) Hasselblad 500C was revisiting this beautiful church building in Kareedouw in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province on the scenic R-62.

The Kareedouw Dutch Reformed Church circa 1993.

And here follows the first payment of school fees.

I revisited this scene early on a beautiful Sunday morning forgetting that the 1993 image above was shot in the afternoon. No biggie there since I could be tempted to revisit it again.

Working with the light shooting the church in Kareedouw.

This image above was shot with my phone as general reference and it gives fairly accurate colour as I remember the scene. It is probably a bit saturated giving colours deeper in intensity than what it really was. You will also see a slight difference in colours between the cellphone image and the scanned negative at the top of this article. I believe that Kodak Portra 160 does yield rather muted tones. I will have to shoot a few more rolls to see if that is indeed the case.

There are so many ideas bouncing around in my head telling you about this outing. Let's see if I can limit it to 2 or 3 worthwhile points.

So I developed this, my very first roll of colour film I developed, using Tetenal's C-41 kit. In South Africa you can get one from these fine folks at Cape Film Supply here. Developing colour film is really not that difficult. Temperature control is critical for colour film, especially for positive (slide) film.

With most Black & White films you gould get away with some temperature variance. Not the case with colour film.

There is good news too. The Tetenal kits come with very clear step-by-step instructions. Even I could get it right.

Now here is one reason why I love 120 roll medium format film. Because the negatives are so large compared to 35mm negatives, an average flatbed scanner can give very nice results. A typical scan yields a file capable of fairly large print files of, say A3 to A2.

Digitising 35mm negatives with a D-SLR.

Unless you have access to a dedicated 35mm scanner, using a camera and macro lens is a good way to digitise 35mm negatives. Even so, a light table or something similar is required to light the negatives from behind or below, depending on how you do it.

If you can find a good 35mm film scanner it will be fairly old and it will be rather expensive. If anything breaks you might just have a very fancy paper weight.

Putting all of this together could be a rather costly affair. It is also rather a bit of a schlep and time consuming.

Here is the next bit of school fees. Film can buckle and, once kinked, that is the end of that. Wide roll film such as 120 is especially prone to buckling if you don't handle it carefully. Another good reason to shoot more than one frame of something really nice.

Looking at the scanned negative at the top it is easy to spot the pale spots. This is caused by slight kinks or buckles in the film. It is easily avoided if the film is loaded into the development reel and tank carefully.

So there will be some school fees shooting film. There will be one or two lessons learned the hard way. I will elaborate on that a bit more in a future article or two.

Fact remains, getting it right with film is so much more rewarding than any digital capture will ever be.

Vintage Mercedes Benz at a car show.

So until next time, happy shooting,

Anton